Andrea Levy's Whitbread and Orange Prize-winning novel has
emigrated from England to American shores with well-deserved
ballyhoo. Levy has intricately woven the lives of four small
islanders --- two from Jamaica, two from England --- into a
tapestry of time and place so intimate and full of color that it
lingers in the reader's memory long after closing the cover.

Gilbert Joseph, a patriotic, mixed race Jamaican subject of the
British crown, enlists in the RAF during World War II. When he
returns to Jamaica after serving in England, his small island seems
hopelessly behind the times and beneath his acquired knowledge and
skills.

Hortense Roberts, half white, half black, has received higher
education in Kingston College and sees herself as more British than
native, therefore deserving more of life than her small island can
offer. Hortense and Gilbert are attracted to each other, not by
lust but by desire of a better life, and forge their future in
London through a financial arrangement.

On another small island, England, Queenie is the rural daughter of
a butcher who flees to London to marry the bland but middle-class
banker Bernard, who also feels called to duty and enlists. Queenie,
now on her own, takes in bombed-out East End refugees, much to the
dismay of the neighbors. When the war ends and Bernard fails to
return, Queenie sublets their large home to immigrants, thus
befriending Gilbert and Hortense and other coloreds. When Bernard
finally does turn up, the cultural and racial clash, which has been
simmering throughout the story, comes to a head.

Writing in the four voices of each main character, Levy humorously
portrays each as they see themselves and one another, presenting
their foibles as great attributes or horrendous faults, depending
on who is speaking. Gilbert Joseph is a charming, funny and loving
gentle man, or a bumbling idiot; a brilliant man with a future as a
lawyer, or a black lackey truck driver. Hortense is a proper
British woman with high language skills, or a gaudily dressed
peasant barely capable of clear thought or speech. Bernard and
Queenie are as colorfully drawn and endearing in their painfully
human situations.

Levy fleshes out these four characters with such clarity and
purpose as to bring them fully to life in a story that swings back
and forth from wartime to postwar England and Jamaica. In less
skillful hands, the plot would be a quagmire to navigate, but in
SMALL ISLAND we are treated to a journey of discovery through the
hopes and aspirations of immigrants and the movement that was the
result of a changed world after World War II.