This book is excellent – I’m sorry it took me so long to read it. I thought I didn’t want to read a WWII novel. I’ve actually been reading a lot of novels by women recently, and I’m consistently pleasantly surprised. I often find myself enjoying a book on a subject I really thought wasn’t for me (WWII, for example), and I’m always a little bit outraged that these books don’t seem to get nearly as much critical acclaim as they should. This book has certainly won awards, but I felt like it wasn’t “pushed” nearly as much as it should have been.

It is at heart a book about empire, about family, and about understandings that sometimes cannot be bridged, or perhaps, must be bridged. It reminded me of A Fine Balance in the best ways, but touched more on what the immigrant ‘windrush’ from the West Indies to Britain after World War II, especially in 1948, meant for Jamaicans and other islanders from the Caribbean as well as for the British at the heart of the empire suddenly inundated with immigrants from the colonies they’d maintained at a sea’s length before. Not too vast to be epic, not too tragic to be unmanageable, but a splendid balance of bitterness and sweetness.

I highly recommend it (that is, re-commend it indeed, because everyone in my family commended it to me).

Oh, and it’s funny. Really.

Verdict: MUST-READ.