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A Booker shortlisted novel by one of the finest writers of his generation.

About the Author

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.

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
*Observer*

[Phillips is] a master ventriloquist, giving immediacy and voice to an impressive range of vivid characters about whom the reader cares deeply... Wonderfully individual
*San Francisco Chronicle*

Caryl Phillips' exploration of the relations betweeen black and white is nuanced, humane and sypathetic. And his deep awareness of the historical process is combined with an exceptionally intelligent prose style - clear, unencumbered and compassionate
*New Statesman and Society*

Here is a brilliantly imagined novel of the African diaspora by the author of Cambridge ( LJ 2/1/92) and Higher Ground ( LJ 8/89), among others. It begins in 18th-century Africa as three children--Nash, Martha, and Travis--are sold into slavery. What follows are ``their'' life stories along with excerpts from the logbook of the slave ship's captain. Nash returns to Africa as a Christian missionary in the 1830s. Martha is a former slave whom we meet as she lays dying in Denver, having failed to reach California and find her only child, taken from her years before. Travis is reincarnated as an American GI stationed in England in 1943; his story is poignantly told by the British woman he marries. Bold in its design, beautiful in its language, compelling because of its characters, this grand novel of ideas--short-listed for the 1993 Booker Prize--belongs in every fiction collection.-- Brian Kenney, Brooklyn P.L.