Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0436200074 ISBN 13: 9780436200076

Publisher: Secker & Warburg, 1992

A semi-autobiographical first novel about rites of passage in London's Asian community. It follows the lives of a group of boys as they make their way through the minefield of English society. The author won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for his first collection of poems, "Slave Song".

About the Author:

David Dabydeen is the director of the Center for Caribbean Studies and a professor at the Center for British Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. He is also Guyana's ambassador-at-large and a member of UNESCO's executive board. He is the author of A Harlot's Progress and Turner, and the poetry collection Slave Song, which won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.

Review:

"Painfully beautiful and true." —Maya Angelou

"Utterly serious, painfully honest and combining, with some originality, the light and the dark, the sweet and the bitter." —Anita Desai, author, The Clear Light of Day


"We badly need novels about the immigrant experience in Britain and this is the best I've read for a long time—vivid, perceptive, funny and moving." —Penelope Lively, author, The Photograph


"Essential reading. [Dabydeen] narrates his painful story with a deft and often humorous touch, and provides us with some startling insights into poverty-stricken Guyana and multi-cultural London." —Caryl Phillips, author, A Distant Shore