Crossing the River

(Paperback)

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Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Award, this is a moving novel about the African diaspora by one of the finest writers of his generation. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize Winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction Caryl Phillips' ambitious and powerful novel spans two hundred and fifty years of the African diaspora. It tracks two brothers and a sister on their separate journeys through different epochs and continents- one as a missionary to Liberia in the 1830s, one a pioneer on a wagon trail to the American West later that century, and one a GI posted to a Yorkshire village in the Second World War. 'Epic and frequently astonishing' The Times 'Its resonance continues to deepen' New York Times

Reviews

A compassionate, forceful and profoundly moving revelation * Scotland on Sunday *
[T]here are gems of impassioned writing quilted within this ambitious cross-cultural novel of loss and reconciliation * Sunday Times *
Epic and frequently astonishing * The Times *
Crossing the River is dense with event and ingeniously structured. It requires concentration and is worth it * Independent *
An ambitious exploration of oppression, loss and reconciliation that employs a collage of styles and ranges across continents and centuries -- Nicci Gerrard * Observer *

Author Bio

Caryl Phillips was born in St Kitts and now lives in London and New York. He has written for television, radio, theatre and cinema and is the author of twelve works of fiction and non-fiction. Crossing the River was shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Award. Caryl Phillips has also won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Best of Young British Writers 1993. A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2004 and Dancing in the Dark was shortlisted in 2006.