We begin at night, on a banana boat travelling from St Kitts to England. Victor’s father is an uneducated man, a canecutter who idles away his time in the rum shop, but Victor has always felt himself to be different, and yearned to get away. He’s hardworking, bookish, ambitious – only his childhood sweetheart, Lorna, understands him. Now, as he sits up on deck listening to the arrogant captain talking about there already being too many “coloured scroungers” in England, he vows not to let anyone or anything get in the way of making a success of his life.
In the next chapter, we shift to a down-and-out pub in 1960s Notting Hill, and we search for Victor in the crowd of new faces. There’s a Mr Wilson, who owns the bar; Charlie, the barman, who dreams of an acting career. Irish Molly, who resists her boyfriend’s demands to go to America, where she fears she’ll only end up as a maid, or working “on her back in some house of ill repute”. Slowly, the reader realises that the “coloured man” nicknamed Lucky – untalkative, rarely making eye contact, mostly glimpsed going up and down to the cellar – is the same Victor who travelled to England from St Kitts, his dreams already in tatters.
Victor begins working for a Jewish landlord, Peter Feldman, collecting rent from the West Indian tenants; soon, he meets Peter’s secretary-girlfriend Ruth, herself estranged from her English family.
A series of betrayals follows, involving this wider cast of characters: it is their self-reported, intertwined narratives that will transport us through the novel, delicately outlining Victor’s life in England over several decades.
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The beauty of the novel lies in that delicacy, in the way it tries to spare these displaced people the humiliation of having to admit to their own failures. The author Caryl Phillips’s concern, as ever, is migration, but the themes are universal – about loneliness, and the self-deception required to carry on through life, despite an increasing accumulation of disappointments.
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Should one go back and make amends for past wrongs, Ruth thinks, or just keep ploughing on? It’s a question that briefly comes into focus, before being swept away by the day-to-day demands of living.
Claire Adam is the author of Golden Child, winner of the Desmond Elliot Prize 2019, and Love Forms (June 2025)
