To Kill a Stereotype? Wider Reading 2: Small Island

The racist past of Britain is well known, but I have never encountered it so well observed and honestly put as I have in Small Island.

Queenie Bligh's neighbours do not approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican Lodgers. Her husband Bernard is in hiding, traumatised by the war. Gilbert Joseph joined the RAF, but finds himself treated very differently by the people of London. And his wife, Hortense, disappointed by her marriage of convenience, also finds London far from the city of her dreams.

The struggle for identity experienced by many coloured people living in England is personified in the characters Hortense and Gilbert. Queenie too, lonely without her husband, struggles with her neighbours complaints at her lodgers. As these two women, against all odds, become friends, they also find their lives inexplicably entangled by one man, Michael Roberts.

"Small Island Explores a point in England's past when the country began to change. It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun."