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Dorothy and Solomon live in a new housing estate on the outskirts of an English village. She's recently bought her bungalow; he's recently become the night watchman. He is black, an immigrant. She is white, a recently retired music teacher. They are both solitary, reticent outsiders. When they move tenuously toward each other and their paths briefly cross, neither of them can know that it will be the last true human contact either will have.

Caryl Phillips' A View of the Empire at Sunset is the sweeping story of the life of the woman who became known to the world as Jean Rhys. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica at the height of the British Empire, Rhys lived in the Caribbean for only 16 years before going to England. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a look into her tempestuous and unsatisfactory life in Edwardian England, 1920s Paris, and then again in London. 

Francis Barber, a Jamaican forced into slavery as a child, becomes the manservant and friend of literary legend Dr. Samuel Johnson. Randy Turpin beats Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951 to become, for a short time, middleweight champion of the world. David Oluwale, stowed away on a ship bound for England from West Africa, has dreams of becoming an engineer. Each man soon falls from grace, becoming just another face with the wrong color skin.

Caryl Phillips has received international acclaim for his works, including the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, and membership in the Royal Society of Literature. Dancing in the Dark brilliantly re-creates the life of Bert Williams, the first black entertainer to achieve stardom in America. In 1896, when Bert decides to perform his stage routine in blackface, he is accused of reviling his race even as he becomes a star in Ziegfeld's Follies.

A sweeping story of orphans and outcasts, haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves. At its centre is Monica Johnson, cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild moors of the north of England. Intertwined with her modern narrative is the ragged childhood of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, the antihero of Wuthering Heights and one of literature’s most enigmatic lost boys.

Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Caryl Phillips has won numerous awards for heralded worksof fiction and nonfiction. In the Falling Snow revolves around Keith, born in England to West Indian parents and raised—for the most part—by his white stepmother. Unmoored by a failing marriage, a distant son, and estrangement from his own father, Keith faces daunting change and must accept unsettling truths about himself and those around him.