Small Island is Andrea Levy’s fourth novel. Published in 2004 to both commercial success and critical acclaim, the novel won many prizes, including the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Orange ‘Best of the Best’ Award and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Its story revolves around the experiences of four characters: Hortense and Gilbert, from Jamaica, and Bernard and Queenie, in whose west London house the Jamaicans become lodgers.
Each main character narrates a section of the book in turn, telling us about the events of their lives (‘Before’) while also giving us a sense of the events of 1948, the year in which Gilbert and Hortense arrive in England. In this way the reader is presented with the life stories of four very different characters, enabling us to see the connections and similarities between them, but to which the characters themselves are often entirely oblivious. At the book’s climax, the four characters are brought together in a dramatic and intense encounter.
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
