A Distant Shore (novel)

A Distant Shore is the seventh novel by Black British author Caryl Phillips, published in 2003 by Secker & Warburg in the UK and Knopf in the US. It was a finalist for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award. In the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize it won the Best Book Prize in the Europe and South Asia category and was judged that year's overall .

Set in contemporary England, A Distant Shore is the story of an African man and an English woman "whose hidden lives, and worlds, are revealed in their fragile, fateful connection". As the author has stated: "It is obviously a novel about the challenged identity of two individuals, but it's also a novel about English—or national—identity."

Reception

Natasha Walter writes for The Guardian: "This novel hums with ambition." Diana Evans, for The Independent, praises the author's exploration of: "migration, asylum, home and loneliness", whilst criticizing certain linguistic cliches, and says that the prose style "lacks edge." Kirkus Reviews summarizes the novel as: "Harsh and sad, but worth the trip."

References

Further reading

• David Ellis, "'They are us': Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore and the British transnation", The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, September 2013, vol. 48, no. 3 411-423.

External links

• Natasha Walter, "The sadness of strangers" (review), The Guardian, 15 March 2003.
• Rand Richards Cooper, "There's No Place That's Home", The New York Times, 19 October 2003.