Strange Fruit
"I go half way round the world and back thinking I’d made some sort of discovery and come back to find the same damn lies, the same white lies, the same black lies."
Alvin and Errol can’t picture much of a future for themselves. They’re young, Black and living in England in the 1980s, with an entire country and political system set against them. Instead they focus firmly on their past – the sunny Caribbean and heroic father they left behind when their mother brought them to England twenty years ago.
But when Alvin returns home from his grandfather’s funeral a new version of their past emerges, and the two brothers are caught in a desperate struggle to unearth the truth about their existence.
Powerful and compelling, Strange Fruit by Caryl Phillips (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize) is the story of a family caught between two cultures, and the uncrossable no man’s land that can come between parents and their children.
Caryl Phillips is a world-renowned playwright and novelist. His novels Crossing the River and A Distant Shore both won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2004 and 2006 respectively. He was the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993 and was awarded the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for his essay collection The European Tribe in 1987. He is Professor of English at Yale University. His novels include The Final Passage, The Atlantic Sound, A State of Independence, Higher Ground, Cambridge, Crossing the River, The Nature of Blood, A Distant Shore, Dancing in the Dark, The Lost Child, and A View of the Empire At Sunset.