It is 1948 in an England still shaken by war. At 21 Nevern Street, London, Queenie Bligh takes into her house lodgers who have recently arrived from Jamaica. What else could she do when her husband, Bernard, never returned from his RAF wartime posting to India? Among her tenants are Gilbert and his new wife, Hortense. Gilbert Joseph was one of the several thousand Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight against Hitler. Returning to England after the war he finds himself treated very differently, now that he is no longer in a blue uniform. Desperation makes him remember a wartime friendship with Queenie and knock at her door. Queenie’s neighbours do not approve of her choice of tenants, and neither would her husband, were he there.
In this delicately wrought and profoundly moving novel, Andrea Levy handles the weighty themes of empire, prejudice, war and love, with a lightness of touch and a generosity of spirit that challenges and uplifts the reader.
The author has won the overall 2005 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book with Small Island, and has already received the highly prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction 2004 and the Whitbread Book of the Year in 2004
