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No one writes about growing up Black, British and Jamaican quite like Andrea Levy. Since 1994, with her debut novel, Every Light in the House Burnin', Levy has been enchanting English readers with her signature style: a delicious blend of British manners, liberal doses of Caribbean flavor, and the author’s own dry wit. Fruit of the Lemon (Picador, $15), her third novel, after being published to wide acclaim in Britain, will finally be released in the United States this month. It tells the story of Faith Jackson, a stylish twentysomething who returns to her parents’ hometown in Jamaica and discovers secrets about her past and truths about herself. Levy fearlessly takes on hot-button issues such as confusion over one’s racial and cultural identity, exploring them with intelligence, grace and humor. It’s why we chose Fruit of the Lemon as our seventh Essence Book Club Recommended Read.
Some of you came to know Levy through 2005’s Small Island (Picador, $14), her first U.S. release, which won three prestigious United Kingdom literary awards, including the Orange Prize and Whitbread Book of the Year, one of the world’s top writing prizes. Levy, 51, who grew up in a White north London housing project, first found her voice in an adult-ed writing class. For inspiration, she sought out the writings by African-American authors such as Toni Morrison, and hopes that American readers will find a similar connection with her work. “We all came out of the same African slave experience,” says Levy, whose parents emigrated to London in 1948 from Jamaica. Though now hailed as one of England’s most significant novelists, Levy remains unpretentious. Laughing, she reveals that she never dreamed of becoming a writer. “Even now, if you catch me off guard, I’ll think, ‘You’re kidding!’ ” But as many more people come to know and love her work, she’ll have to make peace with that title.
Get a 30-Second Book Excerpt
Credit: Angus Muir
Andrea Levy
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In this exclusive excerpt from Fruit of the Lemon, Faith responds to a racist attack on a Black bookstore by White supremacists:
“The story sounded different when Simon retold it. It gained more menace with hindsight. It was now a fact that three men walked into a bookshop in daylight and hit someone over the head with a blunt instrument because they didn’t like them. I interrupted the story twice: ‘She was a Black woman,’ I said. Simon had just called her the woman who worked there. Twice I had to tell them that the woman who was struck on the head was Black like me.”
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