Queenie Jenkins is a 25-year-old Jamaican British woman living in London, straddling two cultures and slotting neatly into neither. She works at a national newspaper, where she's constantly forced to compare herself to her white middle class peers. After a messy break up from her long-term white boyfriend, Queenie seeks comfort in all the wrong places . . . including several hazardous men who do a good job of occupying brain space and a bad job of...

Abel and Vera Paisley are a working-class Jamaican couple, striving to build a better life for their children. Abel travels to London in the early 1960s in search of fortune. Instead, he sees an opportunity to escape the drudgery of his life by faking his death and assuming a new identity. Vera, now a widow, is racked with guilt over her husband's "death" and takes out her grief on her children, Irene and Vincent. The effects of Abel's decision reverberate...

A German soldier risks his life to drop off the sought-after Enigma Machine to British Intelligence, hiding it in a pub in a small town in northeast Scotland, and unwittingly bringing together four very different people who decide to keep it to themselves. Louisa Adair, a young teen girl hired to look after the pub owner's elderly, German-born aunt, Jane Warner, finds it but doesn't report it. Flight-Lieutenant Jamie Beaufort-Stuart intercepts a signal...

"London, 1950. With the war over and London still rebuilding, jazz musician Lawrie Matthews has answered England's call for labour. Arriving from Jamaica aboard the Empire Windrush, he's rented a tiny room in south London and fallen in love with the girl next door. Playing in Soho's jazz clubs by night and pacing the streets as a postman by day, Lawrie has poured his heart into his new home -- and it's alive with possibility. Until one morning, while...

"The Islands follows the lives of Jamaican women--immigrants or the descendants of immigrants--who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism. Set in the United States, Jamaica, and Europe, these international stories examine the lives of an uncertain and unsettled cast of characters. In one story, a woman and her husband impulsively leave San Francisco and move to Florida with wild dreams of American reinvention only to...

College-bound romantic Daniel Bae and Jamaica-born pragmatist Natasha Kingsley meet, and fall for each other, over one magical day amidst the fervor and flurry of New York City. Sparks immediately fly between these two strangers, who might never have met had fate not given them a little push. But will fate be enough to take these teens from star-crossed to lucky in love?

Adamine Bustamante is born in Jamaica, inside one of the islands last leper colonies. When she goes to a Revivalist Church, she discovers her gift of warning. But no one has bothered to warn Adamine that when she migrates to England her prophecies of hurricanes and earthquakes will no longer be respected. People will think she is crazy and lock her away in a mental hospital. Now, an old woman, Adamine wants to tell her own story but she must compete...

"An essential and revelatory coming-of-age narrative following nineteen-year-old Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of his Jehovah's Witness upbringing"--

In this interview conducted shortly before his death in 2014, Stuart Hall, one of the seminal figures in cultural studies, talks about his classic work Policing the Crisis, describes the political, symbolic, and material concerns that animated cultural studies in the 1970s, and offers a critical assessment of the field today. He then turns his attention to the always shifting terrain of race and identity in the United States and Britain, offering...

Stuart Hall is a foundational figure in the influential interdisciplinary field known as cultural studies. In this stimulating and eloquent four-hour interview, conducted by the literary journalist Maya Jaggi and directed by Mike Dibb, Hall reflects on his life and career, talking personally and in depth about the trajectory of his work and how it has intersected with broader political movements. In a conversation both intimate and sweeping in scope,...