The Long Song: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

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After Never Far from Nowhere, Levy visited Jamaica for the first time and what she learned of her family's past provided material for her next book, Fruit of the Lemon (1999). A novel such as Small Island is a hard act to follow, but in her new book Levy has moved into top gear. But, like the brightest pupil with an outworn master, she became quite insistent upon having her way. If, though, committed to a very thin volume, I could peruse her tale at my leisure and no word would be lost when my fickle mind strayed to some other purpose.

Small Island, Levy’s 2004 Orange prize-winner about mid-20th century Caribbean emigrants to Britain, achieved the cultural double gold medal of adaptations by the BBC and the National Theatre (where the 2019 production will be revived next year). In 1994 Levy's first novel, the semi-autobiographical Every Light in the House Burnin', was published and attracted favourable reviews. He said of that day “A mulatto named Campbell, a carpenter, has joined the rebels and came around to entice others to join him on the third, but did not then succeed as he wished. Separated from her mother as an infant, she learns first how to handle, and then how to manipulate, her mistress Caroline.Writing 'The Long Song', her novel set on a 19th century Caribbean slave plantation, was, she says, 'the most terrifying thing to have to go into'. The Long Song is a historical novel by Andrea Levy published in 2010 that was the recipient of the Walter Scott Prize. I would raise life out of her most crabbed script to make her tale flow like some of the finest writing in the English language. It begins with an autobiographical essay and includes stories that are drawn from various life experiences. Kitty felt such little intrusion from the overseer Tam Dewar's part that she decided to believe him merely jostling her from behind like any rough, grunting, huffing white man would if they were crushed together within a crowd.

And it was shocking to have so uplifting an act as reading invite some daft white missus to belch her foolishness into my head.Her father’s Jewish father emigrated to Jamaica after the first world war and converted to Christianity, and her mother was descended from William Ridsguard, a white plantation attorney who had a child with his black housekeeper. Andrea Levy is acclaimed as one of the key British black novelists writing today, and this novel - based on her own family history - is the cornerstone of her work. Although she hoped that her novels would encourage conversations about Britain’s colonial and postcolonial history, including its involvement in slavery, Levy did not wish to be seen as someone who wrote about race. The poet Benjamin Zephaniah said of Levy: "In the future if anybody wants to have a look at how the Windrush generation arrived here and how we the sons and daughters of the Windrush generation survived and are surviving, they have to refer to Andrea's work . Nevertheless, the white folk are also given “shades of grey”, as Sam Jordison noted in the Guardian.