ABSTRACT
Caryl Phillips was born on the island of St Kitts in the West Indies in 1958 but moved to Britain with his family when he was still a baby, growing up in Leeds. Several of Phillips's novels are set in the Caribbean and feature characters who directly struggle with the dark legacy of colonialism and the crises of identity that it can engender. Phillips's first novel The Final Passage fictionalises the experiences of his parents and thousands like them who left the West Indies in the 1950s to travel to Britain in the story of Leila Preston and her husband Michael. Higher Ground indicated Phillips's ambition to increase the density and complexity of his fiction. In The Nature of Blood Phillips writes not about slavery and black suffering but about the Holocaust and Jewish suffering.
