You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This first ever collection of Beryl Gilroy's writings is both controversial and demanding. Gilroy addresses a wide range of subjects that fall within three broad areas--her own works of fiction and autobiography, lifelong learning, and black old age. These essays give important insight into the late Gilroy's literature and reveal the teacher, the psychologist, and the writer.
"After false starts in teaching and social work, Melda Hayley finds her mission in fostering the damaged children of her fellow black settlers in a deeply racist Britain in the 1950s." "But though Melda finds daily uplift in her work, her inner life starts to come apart. Her brother Arnie has married a white woman and his defection from the family and the distress Melda witnesses amongst the children she fosters causes her repressed memories to surface and her own 'buried wounds to weep'." "Melda confronts the cruelties she has suffered as an 'outside child' at the hands of her stepmother. But though the past drives Melda towards breakdown, she finds strengths there too, especially in the memories of the loving, supporting women of the 'yards' of rural Guyana. Then there is Pa who, in his new material security in the USA, discovers a gentle caring side and teaches his children to sing 'in praise of love and children."
The rediscovered classic: an unforgettable memoir by a trailblazing black woman in post-war London, introduced by Bernardine Evaristo ('I dare anyone to read it and not come away shocked, moved and entertained')Benjamin Zephaniah: 'A must-read. Her life makes you laugh. Her life makes you cry. Get to know her.'Jacqueline Wilson: 'A superb but shocking memoir ... Imaginative, resilient and inspiring.'Christie Watson: 'A beautiful memoir of one woman's strength and dignity against the odds.'Steve McQueen: 'Gilroy blazed a path that empowered generations of Black British educators.'David Lammy: 'This empowering tale of courage, resistance, and triumph is a breath of fresh air.'Diana Evans: 'Imp...
None
As a black child, born in present-day London, Tyrone has always been encircled by the loving arms of his family. But this secure world begins to fragment when his grandparents are evicted and violence shatters the heart of the black community. Could help come from the far-off island that had nurtured his parents and grandparents?
This book brings back to life in rich detail the Afro-Guyanese village community of the author's childhood, where there were old people who had been slaves as children and Africa was not forgotten. It was a time when children did not have open access to the world of adults and childhood had not yet disappeared, and perhaps for this reason, the men and women who pass through these stories have a mystery and singularity that are as unforgettable for the reader as they were for the child.
Marvella Payne is twenty-seven, works as a secretary for British Rail and has pledged to the congregation of the Church of the Holy Spirit that she will abstain from sex before marriage. When she repulses the groping hands of the trainee-deacon, Carlton Springle, she resigns herself to growing old with her mother, father and Bible-soaked aunts. But Aunt Julie has other ideas and finds Marvella a penfriend from her native Guyana. When good fortune allows the couple to meet, Marvella awakens to new possibilities as she realises how bound she has been by the voices of her dependent, cossetted childhood. But will marriage be another entrapment, another loss of self? "Gather the Faces has a happy...
"In 1786, the Scottish poet Robert Burns, penniless and needing to escape the consequences of his complicated love life, accepted the position of book-keeper on an estate in Jamaica. The success of his Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect made this escape unnecessary. Thus far is historical fact. In Andrew Lindsay's novel, Burns indeed goes to Jamaica and then to the Dutch colony of Demerara where, into the world of sugar and slavery, he brought his propensity for falling in love, his humanity and his urge to write poetry. In 1997 a small mahogany chest is found in a Wai Wai Amerindian village in Guyana. It contains Burns' journal from 1786 to 1796, when he died." "Andrew Lindsay's novel is a work of imaginative invention, poetic description and meticulous historical reconstruction. As a fellow Scot who has settled in Guyana, Lindsay brings an incomer's fresh eye to the Caribbean landscape and imaginative insights into how Burns as a man of his times might have responded to slavery. Not least, Illustrious Exile contains some brilliant versions of Burns' poems, as written in the Caribbean."--BOOK JACKET.
This much-needed collection examines the formation of a black British canon including writers, dramatists, film-makers and artists. Contributors including John McLeod, Michael McMillan, Mike Phillips and Alison Donnell discuss the textual, political and cultural history of black British and the term 'black British' itself.
Caribbean Women Writers is a collection of scholarly articles on the fiction of selected Caribbean women writers from Antigua, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad. It includes not only close critical analysis of texts by Erna Brodber, Dionne Brand, Zee Edgell, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, Pauline Melville, Jean Rhys and Olive Senior, but also personal statements from the writers Merle Collins, Beryl Gilroy, Vernella Fuller and Velma Pollard.