Homecoming

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

When Colin Grant was growing up in Luton in the 1960s, he learned not to ask his Jamaican parents why they had emigrated to Britain. ‘We’re here because we’re here,’ his father would say. ‘You have some place else to go?’

But now, seventy years after the arrival of ships such as the Windrush, this generation of pioneers are ready to tell their stories.

Homecoming draws on over a hundred first-hand interviews, archival recordings and memoirs by the women and men who came to Britain from the West Indies between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. In their own words, we witness the transition from the optimism of the first post-war arrivals to the race riots of the late 1950s. We hear from nurses in Manchester; bus drivers in Bristol; seamstresses in Birmingham; teachers in Croydon; dockers in Cardiff; inter-racial lovers in High Wycombe, and Carnival Queens in Leeds. These are stories of hope and regret, of triumphs and challenges, brimming with humour, anger and wisdom. Together, they reveal a rich tapestry of Caribbean British lives.

Homecoming is an unforgettable portrait of a generation, which brilliantly illuminates an essential and much-misunderstood chapter of our history.

(c) 2019, Colin Grant (P) 2019 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

  • 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

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