Small Island is a novel written by British author Andrea Levy. The novel, published in 2004, tells the story of post-war Caribbean migration through four narrators – Hortense and Gilbert, who migrate from Jamaica to London in 1948, and the English couple, Queenie and Bernard, in whose house in London Hortense and Gilbert find lodgings.

Characters

The novel has four main characters—Hortense, Queenie, Gilbert and Bernard—who each tell the story from their point of view. Mainly set in 1948, the plot focuses on the diaspora of Jamaican immigrants, who, escaping economic hardship on their own "small island", move to England, the Mother Country, for which the men have fought during World War II. While the novel focuses on the narratives of Gilbert and Hortense as they adjust to life in England, after a reception that is not quite the warm embrace that they had hoped for, the interracial relationship between Queenie and Michael is central to the plot and the connections that are established between all of the characters. As the story is narrated from various viewpoints, it is achronological, skipping around to discuss each character's life before the outbreak of WWII. Two of the book's characters were based on black civil rights leader Billy Strachan.

Character summaries

Critical reception and other recognition

It was published by Headline Review to critical success. According to Book Marks, the book received "rave" reviews based on 7 critic reviews with 4 being "rave" and 3 being "positive". On Bookmarks Magazine May/June 2005 issue, a magazine that aggregates critic reviews of books, the book received a (3.5 out of 5) based on critic reviews with the critical summary stating, "Levy, the child of parents who sailed from the Caribbean in the first wave of postwar immigration, fictionalizes the immigrant experience in her fourth novel. Relying on memoirs and oral histories, she describes in heartwrenching detail the lives of four individuals in 1948 England". On 5 November 2019 BBC News included Small Island on its list of the 100 most influential novels. It was described in The Guardian by Mike Phillips as Levy's "big book". Levy said in 2004: "When I started Small Island I didn’t intend to write about the war. I wanted to start in 1948 with two women, one white, one black, in a house in Earls Court, but when I asked myself, 'Who are these people and how did they get here?' I realised that 1948 was so very close to the war that nothing made sense without it. If every writer in Britain were to write about the war years there would still be stories to be told, and none of us would have come close to what really happened. It was such an amazing schism in the middle of a century. And Caribbean people got left out of the telling of that story, so I am attempting to put them back into it. But I am not telling it from only a Jamaican point of view. I want to tell stories from the black and white experience. It is a shared history." In 2009, The Guardian selected Small Island as one of the defining books of the decade. It won three awards: the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Orange Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. In 2022, Small Island was included on the "Big Jubilee Read" list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.

Adaptations

The novel was adapted for television in two parts by the BBC in 2009. A stage adaptation by Helen Edmundson opened at the National Theatre in April 2019 and the production was discussed with members of the cast on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour in May 2019.