Crossing the River
  • Published: 1 November 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099498261
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

Crossing the River

Formats & editions
EBook
15 Feb 2011
Paperback
1 Nov 2006
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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
  • Published: 1 November 2006
  • ISBN: 9780099498261
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $24.99
Categories:

About the author

Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Crossing the River (shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1993) and A Distant Shore (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize 2004). Phillips has won the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN Open Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, as well as being named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year 1992 and one of the Granta Best of Young British Writers 1993. He has also written for television, radio, theatre and film.

portrait photo of Caryl Phillips

Also by Caryl Phillips

The Lost Child
A View of the Empire at Sunset
Colour Me English
Higher Ground
In the Falling Snow
Cambridge
The Nature of Blood
See all

Praise for Crossing the River

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

An ambitious exploration of oppression, loss and reconciliation that employs a collage of styles and ranges across continents and centuries

Nicci Gerrard, Observer

Crossing the River is dense with event and ingeniously structured. It requires concentration and is worth it

Independent

Epic and frequently astonishing

The Times

[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
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