Small Island

Andrea Levy's Small Island, published in 2004, is set mainly in London in 1948 and told in four voices. Hortense arrives from Jamaica to join a husband she has barely met, expecting the country she was raised to think of as home. Gilbert, her husband, has served in the Royal Air Force during the war and is living in a single rented room in a house owned by Queenie, whose husband Bernard is still finding his way back to the life they had. The four of them take turns to tell the story, so the same months and the same rooms are seen from two Jamaican and two English points of view.

The novel moves between Jamaica and England and between the war years and the period after them, drawing on the post-war migration of Caribbean families to Britain and on what Gilbert and Hortense had been taught to expect when they got there. It also stays with Queenie and Bernard, whose marriage and household have their own damage from the war, and with the awkward business of sharing a house across lines of race, class and assumption.

Small Island was published in 2004, and Levy returned to the same broad territory of Caribbean and British history in her later novel The Long Song.