Jun 28

Jun 28 Small Island

Author: Andrea Levy
Publisher: Picador
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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

Small Island is an international bestseller. It won the Orange Prize for Fiction, The Orange Prize for Fiction: Best of the Best, The Whitbread Novel Award, The Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. It has now been adapted for the screen as a coproduction of the BBC and Masterpiece/WGBH Boston.

Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Her husband, Gilbert Joseph, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class. His white landlady, Queenie, raised as a farmer's daughter, befriends Gilbert, and later Hortense, with innocence and courage, until the unexpected arrival of her husband, Bernard, who returns from combat with issues of his own to resolve.

Told in these four voices, Small Island is a courageous novel of tender emotion and sparkling wit, of crossings taken and passages lost, of shattering compassion and of reckless optimism in the face of insurmountable barriers — in short, an encapsulation of that most American of experiences: the immigrant's life.

TL;DR Review

Small Island is a fantastic historical novel about pride, connection, racism, and humans’ shared humanity.

For you if: You like literary historical fiction that tackles important themes.

Full Review

I read Small Island because it won the Women’s Prize in 2004, so it was next up for me in the #ReadingWomen challenge. I’d never heard of it and so probably wouldn’t have found it on my own, but I’m really, really glad I did.

“Present day” in this story is just after WWII has ended, and it features four main characters: Hortense and Gilbert, who have come to live in England from Jamaica, and Queenie and Bernard, who own the home Hortense and Gilbert rent a room in. But the story flashes backward into each of these characters’ histories, one by one, to show you how they came to be who they are and how they came to be in the place they are now.

At least here in the United States, WWII feels like a time of heroism — when the world came together to defeat Naziism and the idea of the “master race.” But we so rarely consider that all this happened before the Civil Rights movement, and that anti-Black racism was in full force. Jim Crow was alive and well. What I didn’t know before reading this was that Americans brought segregation to Europe with them, demanded it no matter where they went. And that anti-Black racism in England was also fierce and strong.

This book feels like what novels are meant to be. A sweeping story that tangles up your heart and reveals truths about living in this world, with other people, in a way that deepens our understanding. Each and every one of the characters is proud and flawed and a product of the world they live in. Ultimately, it’s about how easy it is to misunderstand one another when prejudice and racism get in the way. How easy it is to judge and then feel defensive when we ourselves fear or experience being judged.