The Windrush generation, in their own words - Homecoming is the first book to bring together oral testimonies of the post-war Caribbean immigrants to Britain
Colin Grant is a historian and author of four highly praised books, including Bageye at the Wheel, a memoir about his Jamaican family. He is an Associate Fellow in the Centre for Caribbean Studies, and teaches creative non-fiction writing. He has worked as a BBC radio producer and writes for many publications, including the Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and New York Review of Books.
A remarkable oral history of black postwar British life… Homecoming
is an extraordinary and compelling book in which the memories of
bus drivers, civil servants, engineers, nurses, RAF and army
recruits, teachers, shop stewards and seamstresses jostle with
those of journalists, musicians, novelists and poets... The
recovered memories in Homecoming are a formidable challenge to
those still nostalgic for a lost empire, to all who cling to narrow
and parochial definitions of Britishness... The voices in
Homecoming sing throughout the book but they also reverberate pain,
for so many are recounting stories they do not want to
remember.
*Daily Telegraph*
Grant is the writer to do justice to [the Windrush Generation’s]
lives… he has conducted dozens of interviews, dug into the Mass
Observation archives, and combed through semi-forgotten oral
histories from the 1960s to produce this anthology of submerged
lives that prickles with beautiful, comic and brutal details.
*Observer*
Homecoming by Colin Grant is...by turns sad, painful, warm,
revelatory and utterly fascinating. I think we would live in a
slightly kinder and better country if everyone read [it].
*New Statesman *Books of the Year**
Drawing on scores of first-hand accounts, Colin Grant offers oral
history at its finest.
*Daily Mail*
Hundreds of first hand interviews, archive footage and memoir
extracts of the Windrush Generation, beautifully edited into a
patchwork quilt of experience and heritage. It's so powerful
hearing these voices direct, making for a hopeful and angry, joyful
and tear-jerking read.
*Grazia*
[Grant] lets people speak for themselves… there is much to enjoy.
Some of the memories are painful, some are joyous, others are much
more ambivalent.
*The Times*
The Windrush generation’s voices are rarely heard, but Grant’s
anthology is informative and funny, a well-researched window into a
vanished world.
*i*
[An] impressive work of oral history.
*BBC History*
Colin Grant has interviewed and collected nearly 200 voices from
[the Windrush] era, from all walks of life, including policemen and
fascists. It's quite a feat.
*i Newspaper*
The structure of Homecoming gives its subjects space to speak for
themselves, with each vignette providing a glimpse into little
known history… Grant’s collection of voice…exposes effectively the
cruel logic of Britain’s legacy of domination.
*Guardian*
Interesting and nuanced.
*Literary Review*
[A] superb oral history… Interspersed with social commentary and
pages of sprightly autobiography.
*Tablet*
In Homecoming… Colin Grant collates fragments from several hundred
interviews, first-hand and archival, with a cross-section of
Caribbean immigrants to Britain from the 1940s and early 60s, and
allows his subjects to speak for themselves in idiosyncratic
statements that refuse to be co-opted into a generalized account of
immigrant experience… A fascinatingly varied tapestry emerges of
why people came, what they made of it when they got here, and how
they related both their Caribbeanness and their blackness.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Homecoming is an important book which records the voice of a
generation as they fade into history... here we can listen to that
generation telling its story in its own words.
*Country & Town House*
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