Book description
In The Atlantic Sound Caryl Phillips explores the complex
notion of what constitutes 'home'. Seen through the historical prism
of the Atlantic Slave trade, he undertakes a personal quest to come to
terms with the dislocation and discontinuities that a diasporan
history engenders in the soul of an individual.
Philips journeys from the Caribbean to Britain by banana boat,
repeating a journey he made to England as a child in the 1950s. He
then visits three pivotal cities: Liverpool, developed on the back of
the slave trade, Elmina, on the west coast of Ghana, site of the most
important slave fort in Africa; and Charleston in the American South,
celebrated as the city where the Civil War began - not for being the
city where fully one-third of African-Americans were landed and sold
into bondage.
Finally, Phillips journeys to Israel where he encounters a community
of two thousand African-Americans, whose thirty-year sojourn in the
Negev desert leaves him once again contemplating the modern condition
of diasporan displacement.
Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts and now lives in London and New
York. He has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema and is
the author of twelve works of fiction and non-fiction.
Crossing the River
was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and Caryl Phillips has won
the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being named the
Sunday Times
Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Best of Young British
Writers 1993.
A Distant Shore
won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2004 and
Dancing in the Dark
was shortlisted in 2006.
