'Taut, fascinating and controversial. The Atlantic Sound may prove to be as influential today as Roots was a generation ago' Sunday Times
In The Atlantic Sound Caryl Phillips explores the complex notion of what constitutes 'home'. Seen through the historical prism of the Atlantic Slave trade, he undertakes a personal quest to come to terms with the dislocation and discontinuities that a diasporan history engenders in the soul of an individual.
Philips journeys from the Caribbean to Britain by banana boat, repeating a journey he made to England as a child in the 1950s. He then visits three pivotal cities: Liverpool, developed on the back of the slave trade, Elmina, on the west coast of Ghana, site of the most important slave fort in Africa; and Charleston in the American South, celebrated as the city where the Civil War began - not for being the city where fully one-third of African-Americans were landed and sold into bondage.
Finally, Phillips journeys to Israel where he encounters a community of two thousand African-Americans, whose thirty-year sojourn in the Negev desert leaves him once again contemplating the modern condition of diasporan displacement.
- New eBook additions
- Available now
- Most popular
- Childhood Classic eBooks
- Dyslexia
- Unmissable Picture Books
- Try something different
- Crime Doesn't Pay
- Novella & Short Story Classics
- Read-Along
- Out-of-this-world Sci-Fi
- The Booker Prize
- Book Prize Reads
- See all
- New audiobook additions
- Books on Film
- Try something different
- Available now
- Read by a Celeb
- Most popular
- New kids additions
- New teen additions
- Interesting Lives: Memoirs & Biographies
- Crime Doesn't Pay
- Popular Audiobooks
- Series Starters
- Thrilling Audio
- See all