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. 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. Hortense Joseph arrives in London from Jamaica in 1948 with her life in her suitcase, her heart broken, her resolve intact. Andrea Levy's Small Island 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. The dustwrapper has some minor surface abrasion but remains very good and has not been price-clipped.An international bestseller. Condition: The book is in good plus condition, with some very light spotted foxing to the page edges. In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a superb lightness of touch and generosity of spirit.
Small Island explores a point in England's past when the country began to change.
But London is far from the golden city of her dreams, and even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was. Gilbert's wife Hortense, who for years has longed for a better life in England, soon joins him.
But when he returns to England as a civilian he doesn't receive the welcome he was expecting, and it's desperation that drives him to knock at Queenie's door. Gilbert Joseph was one of the many Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight Hitler. Queenie Bligh's neighbours don't approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but with her husband, Bernard, not back from the war, she has little choice in the matter. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun. It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war.
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