Small island / Andrea Levy.

This book is not to be confused with Bill Bryson's Notes from a small island that I reviewed several weeks ago. Levy's book won several prizes, including the 2004 Orange Prize and was selected by the Guardian newspaper in 2009 as one of the defining books of the decade in the U.K.

I love a book with a satisfying ending and this book, in my opinion, ends very satisfactorily. The lives of the four main characters in the book intersect and influence each other in unexpected ways. There is humor, too, to break up the serious content of the book.

The "small island" of this book is both England and Jamaica and the events occur during and soon after World War II. The main characters Queenie and Bernard are English and Hortense and Gilbert are from Jamaica. Each of them narrates portions of the book, with Bernard's narration being one of the last.

In the "prequel," Queenie is a very young child when she visits the British Empire Exhibition with her family. She sees a black man there and unthinkingly refers to him using derogatory language. Many years later, she marries Bernard, a fellow Londoner and meek bank clerk. Bernard fights overseas during the war and Queenie remains in London to manage as best as she can. And manage she does, although in the thinking of the day, her actions are unconventional and highly improper.

Hortense and Gilbert grow up in Jamaica, but their education and other influences have set England as the Mother Country, the ideal, the model for speech, behavior and all other standards. Gilbert volunteers to serve in the Royal Air Force for England. When he returns to Jamaica after the war, he dates Hortense's friend Celia and asks her to return with him to desirable England and to bring her mother. Hortense is with them, and she tells Gilbert of Celia's mother's mental illness and resulting bizarre behavior in great detail. Later with Celia out of the picture, she tells Gilbert that she has the money he needs for passage to England and that they can be married, where she will join him.

The Jamaicans are shocked by their experiences in England. Nothing is as they expected it to be and had prepared themselves for. They are especially disturbed by racist attitudes, including insulting language. Gilbert was confronted by a great deal of prejudice while serving in the Royal Air Force, but he expected that he would be received with gratitude and acknowledgement of his service to England. Rather than being welcomed, he found that obtaining employment and a place to live was almost impossible.

But the actions of a Jamaican friend of Hortense and Gilbert, which they are unaware of, starts a sequence of events that ends in uniting the fates of the four people. Here is the link to its Wikipedia entry.

Here is a link that might be useful: Small island

This post was edited by stacey_mb on Thu, Jul 18, 13 at 12:10