Synopses & Reviews
A powerful and affecting new book from Caryl Phillips: a brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact that tells the stories of three black men whose lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society.
Francis Barber, "given" to the great eighteenth-century writer Samuel Johnson, more companion than servant, afforded an unusual depth of freedom that, after Johnson's death, hastened his wretched demise...Randolph Turpin, who made history in 1951 by defeating Sugar Ray Robinson, becoming Britain's first black world-champion boxer, a top-class fighter for twelve years whose life ended in debt and despair...David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949, the events of whose life called into question the reality of English justice, and whose death at the hands of police in 1969 served as a wake-up call for the entire nation.
Each of these men's stories is rendered in a different, perfectly realized voice. Each illuminates the complexity and drama that lie behind the simple notions of haplessness that have been used to explain the tragedy of these lives. And each explores, in entirely new ways, the themes at once timeless and urgent that have been at the heart of all of Caryl Phillips's remarkable work: belonging, identity, and race.
Review
"Flawlessly blending many of the techniques of fiction and journalism...Foreigners is written with all of his usual energy, precision, and fierce sympathy for his characters' strengths and weaknesses alike....For his artistic vision and moral courage, at a time when these qualities are in short supply yet matter as much as ever, we owe Caryl Phillips a deep debt of gratitude." Boston Globe
Review
"Readers familiar with Caryl Phillips's award-winning novels know how skillfully he combines fiction and history to convey the complex nature of racial, national and personal identities in modern Britain....In this triptych of fictionalized biographies, Phillips's characters remain strangers in a strange land, alienated from their countrymen by circumstance and racism, as well as by their own behavior." Vincent Carretta, The Washington Post Book World (read the entire Washington Post Book World review)
About the Author
Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts, West Indies, and brought up in England. He is also the author of three books of nonfiction and eight novels. His most recent book, Dancing in the Dark, won the 2006 PEN/Beyond Margins Award; A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Prize. His other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and currently lives in New York City.