Caryl Phillips has 5 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators, with an average listener rating of 5★ across 1 ratings. The most-rated is A View of the Empire at Sunset.
A View of the Empire at Sunset
Summary
Award-winning author Caryl Phillips presents a biographical novel of the life of Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, which was written as a prequel to Jane Eyre. Caryl Phillips' A View of the Empire at Sunset is the sweeping story of the life of the woman who became known to the world as Jean Rhys. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica at the height of the British Empire, Rhys lived in the Caribbean for only 16 years before going to England. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a look into her tempestuous and unsatisfactory life in Edwardian England, 1920s Paris, and then again in London. Her dream had always been to one day return home to Dominica. In 1936 a 45-year-old Rhys was finally able to make the journey back to the Caribbean. Six weeks later she boarded a ship for England, filled with hostility for her home, never to return. Phillips' gripping new novel is equally a story about the beginning of the end of a system that had sustained Britain for two centuries but that wreaked havoc on the lives of all who lived in the shadow of the empire: both men and women, colonizer and colonized. A true literary feat, A View of the Empire at Sunset uncovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by offering a look into the life of one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century and retelling a profound story that is singularly its own.
©2018 Caryl Phillips (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
In the Falling Snow
Summary
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Caryl Phillips has won numerous awards for heralded worksof fiction and nonfiction. In the Falling Snow revolves around Keith, born in England to West Indian parents and raised—for the most part—by his white stepmother. Unmoored by a failing marriage, a distant son, and estrangement from his own father, Keith faces daunting change and must accept unsettling truths about himself and those around him.
©2009 Caryl Phillips (P)2010 Recorded Books, LLC
Foreigners
Summary
Award-winning author Caryl Phillips shares the stories of three foreigners - displaced black men struggling to find a place in a white world. Each man's story is based on truth, re-imagined from a set of unique perspectives. Francis Barber, a Jamaican forced into slavery as a child, becomes the manservant and friend of literary legend Dr. Samuel Johnson. Randy Turpin beats Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951 to become, for a short time, middleweight champion of the world. David Oluwale, stowed away on a ship bound for England from West Africa, has dreams of becoming an engineer. Each man soon falls from grace, becoming just another face with the wrong color skin.
©2007 Caryl Phillips (P)2008 Recorded Books
The Lost Child
Summary
A sweeping story of orphans and outcasts, haunted by the past and fighting to liberate themselves. At its centre is Monica Johnson, cut off from her parents after falling in love with a foreigner, and her bitter struggle to raise her sons in the shadow of the wild moors of the north of England. Intertwined with her modern narrative is the ragged childhood of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, the antihero of Wuthering Heights and one of literature’s most enigmatic lost boys.
©2015 Caryl Phillips (P)2015 W F Howes Ltd
A Distant Shore
Summary
Dorothy and Solomon live in a new housing estate on the outskirts of an English village. She's recently bought her bungalow; he's recently become the night watchman. He is black, an immigrant. She is white, a recently retired music teacher. They are both solitary, reticent outsiders. When they move tenuously toward each other and their paths briefly cross, neither of them can know that it will be the last true human contact either will have. A Distant Shore unfolds into the past to show us how Solomon and Dorothy have arrived at this moment: Solomon, a former soldier, escaping the horrors of a war-ravaged African country, entering England illegally, a non-man with no resources but his own waning strength, and no comprehension of the society that both hates and harbors him; Dorothy, the product of a troubled childhood and a messy divorce, fleeing the repercussions of a desperate obsession. In scene after resonant scene, we watch as Solomon and Dorothy come to live inside themselves, closing off from a world that has changed--and changed them--beyond recognition. In their powerfully compelling stories, Caryl Phillips has created a brilliant and moving portrait of modern human displacement: from home, from heart, and from self.
©2003 Caryl Phillips (P)2012 Audible, Inc.