Faith Jackson knows little about her parents’ lives before they moved to England. Happy to be starting her first job in the costume department at BBC television, and to be sharing a house with friends, Faith is full of hope and expectation. But when her parents announce that they are moving “home” to Jamaica, Faith’s fragile sense of her identity is threatened. Angry and perplexed as to why her parents would move to a country they so rarely mention, Faith becomes increasingly aware of the covert and public racism of her daily life, at home and at work.
At her parents’ suggestion, in the hope it will help her to understand where she comes from, Faith goes to Jamaica for the first time. There she meets her Aunt Coral, whose storytelling provides Faith with ancestors, whose lives reach from Cuba and Panama to Harlem and Scotland. Branch by branch, story by story, Faith scales the family tree, and discovers her own vibrant heritage, which is far richer and wilder than she could have imagined.
Fruit of the Lemon spans countries and centuries, exploring questions of race and identity with humor and a freshness, and confirms Andrea Levy as one of our most exciting contemporary novelists.
About the Author
Andrea Levy was born in London in 1956 to Jamaican parents. She is the author of five novels, and one short story collection which explore the problems faced by black British-born children of Caribbean emigrants. Her first book Every Light In The House Burnin’ was published in 1994, it was followed By Never Far From Nowhere in 1996 and Fruit Of The Lemon.
While these novels were well received, it was Small Island published in 2004, which really put her on the literary map. It won the Orange Prize, the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize, and was the winner of the Orange Prize ‘Best of the Best’. In 2009 it was made into an award-winning BBC television drama. After Small Island came The Long Song in 2010, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Walter Scott Prize. Her final book was the short story collection, Six Stories And An Essay published in 2014.
She was widely regarded as the first black British author to achieve both critical and mainstream commercial success, and as a trailblazer for a younger generation of writers. She contributed recently to the dialogue on the anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush in the UK and was a judge for the Saga Prize and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Other books by the author:
Every Light in the House Burning
Never Far from Nowhere
Small Island
The Long Song
Uriah’s War
Six Stories and an Essay.
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