The English village is a place where people come to lick their wounds. Dorothy has walked away from a bad 30-year marriage and is trying to rebuild a life. It's not immediately clear why her neighbour, Solomon, is living nearby, but gradually they establish a form of comfort in each other's presence that alleviates the isolation they both feel.

Phillips explores three cities of slavery. Liverpool, constructed on the slave trade, now denying its past; the Ghanaian city of Elmina, site of the important slave embarkation fort in Africa; and Charleston, known as the entry point to America where one-third of black slaves were bought and sold.

The stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak resoundingly to the place and role of the foreigner in English society: Francis Barber, who was 'given' to Samuel Johnson, Randolph Turpin, Britain's first black world champion boxer, and David Oluwale, whose death at the hands of the police in 1969 was a wake-up call to the nation.

Born in the Bahamas, Bert Williams moved to California with his family. Too poor to attend Stanford University, he took to life on the stage with his friend George Walker. Together they played lumber camps and mining towns until they eventually made the agonising decision to 'play the coon'. This novel is about the life of one remarkable man.

Tracks two brothers and a sister on their separate journeys through different epochs and continents: one as a missionary to Liberia in the 1830s, one a pioneer on a wagon trail to the American West later that century, and one a GI posted to a Yorkshire village in the Second World War.

Tells the story of Emily Cambridge, a young woman sent from England to visit her father's West Indian plantation, and Cambridge, a plantation slave, educated and Christianised by his first master in England who is now struggling to maintain his dignity.

A young Jewish woman growing up in Germany in the middle of the twentieth century and an African general hired by the Doge to command his armies in sixteenth century Venice are bound by personal crisis and momentous social conflict. What emerges is Europe's age-old obsession with race, with sameness and difference, with blood.

Social worker Keith, separated from his wife and their teenage son, is floundering in a world of fraught sexual politics, parental responsibilities and class expectations.

"I go half way round the world and back thinking I'd made some sort of discovery and come back to find the same damn lies, the same white lies, the same black lies." Alvin and Errol can't picture much of a future for themselves. They're young, Black and living in England in the 1980s, with an entire country and political system set against them. Instead they focus firmly on their past - the sunny Caribbean and heroic father they left behind when their mother brought them to England twenty years ago. But when Alvin returns home from his grandfather's funeral a new version of...