Lit: RIP novelist Andrea Levy

Writer Andrea Levy, who has died of cancer aged 62, gained wide recognition with the publication of her fourth novel, Small Island, in 2004. Intertwining the stories of two couples, one white British, the other Jamaican, and their struggles to survive and come to terms with one another in Britain during and after the second world war, Small Island was awarded the Orange prize, the Whitbread prize and, the following year, the Commonwealth literature prize. Ten years later, it was voted the Best of the Best Orange prize novels, and this May 

Levy’s previous novels had gathered a smaller circle of admirers who had a particular interest in the experience of Caribbean immigrants in Britain. Her first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994), is semi-autobiographical, depicting the difficulties faced and sometimes overcome by a Jamaican family in 1960s London. Two years later she published Never Far from Nowhere, set during the 1970s and focusing on the different choices made by the two daughters of Jamaican immigrants living on a council estate in London.

Although she was by no means the first Caribbean British writer to depict the experiences of the Windrush arrivals in the 1940s and 50s, Levy differed from earlier writers such as Sam Selvon, George Lamming and Beryl Gilroy in her focus on the experience of families with children, and especially the daughters of that generation, children who saw themselves not primarily in racial terms but as middle-class and British.

Fruit of the Lemon (1999), Levy’s third novel, began a longer project to explore the history of British Jamaicans and the impact of their complex inheritance. The title refers to the popular song: “Lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet/ But the fruit of the lemon is impossible to eat.” The bitter fruit that the novel’s narrator, Faith Jackson, tastes is her growing realisation of racism and colour consciousness in both Britain and Jamaica. Nevertheless, her discovery of Jamaican culture and her family’s complex history allow Faith to return to Britain with restored self-confidence.