The lonely Londoners

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The lonely Londoners

The jacket front illustration depicts two Afro-Caribbean men and an Afro-Caribbean woman on a city sidewalk in front of a fence. A photograph of the author, Samuel Selvon, is on the jacket back.

About this item

Title:: The lonely Londoners

Identifier:: PR9272.9.S4L661956

Permalink:: https://n2t.net/ark:/81984/d3jz9t

Type:: Image

Notes:: Robin Adler took the author photograph. Novel of newly arrived West Indian immigrants in London narrated in Soft Creole. Writing from the point of a view of the newly arrived emigrant in The Lonely Londoners, Selvon reveals that their expectations are high. The emigrant is part of a community that shares a common predicament and a common language. He is sustained by a sense of Caribbean identity as he lays claim to the metropolis in expected fulfillment of his status as a colonial. At the center of the novel is the experience of the group, - "the boys", as they are referred to repeatedly, though Moses Alloetta emerges as their natural leader by virtue of his experience and superior skills at spinning a yarn or ballad. However, the emigrants' expectations of a better life in Britain are ill conceived, and at the end of The Lonely Londoners, Moses, despite the good times, sees a forlorn shadow of doom hanging over the emigrant community. Lonely and anxious, Moses dreams of writing a best-seller, of becoming a literary giant and escaping the drudgery of the workplace. Selvon's novels illustrate the panoply of different "cities" that are lived in London, as with any major city, due to class and racial boundaries. In many ways, his books are the precursors to works such as Some Kind of Black by Diran Adebayo, White Teeth by Zadie Smith and The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi.