Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation (Paperback)

'Colin Grant has interviewed and collected nearly 200 voices from [the Windrush] era, from all walks of life, including policemen and fascists. It's quite a feat to pull together such an array of voices without producing a cacophony.' - Bernardine Evaristo, winner of the Booker Prize 2019

'A remarkable oral history of black postwar British life... Homecoming is an extraordinary and compelling book in which the memories of bus drivers, civil servants, engineers, nurses, RAF and army recruits, teachers, shop stewards and seamstresses jostle with those of journalists, musicians, novelists and poets... The recovered memories in Homecoming are a formidable challenge to those still nostalgic for a lost empire, to all who cling to narrow and parochial definitions of Britishness... The voices in Homecoming sing throughout the book but they also reverberate pain, for so many are recounting stories they do not want to remember.' - Hazel V Carby, The Daily Telegraph 

'Grant is the writer to do justice to [the Windrush Generation's] lives... he has conducted dozens of interviews, dug into the Mass Observation archives, and combed through semi-forgotten oral histories from the 1960s to produce this anthology of submerged lives that prickles with beautiful, comic and brutal details.' - The Observer

'Hundreds of first hand interviews, archive footage and memoir extracts of the Windrush Generation, beautifully edited into a patchwork quilt of experience and heritage. It's so powerful hearing these voices direct, making for a hopeful and angry, joyful and tear-jerking read.' - Grazia

'[Grant] lets people speak for themselves... there is much to enjoy. Some of the memories are painful, some are joyous, others are much more ambivalent.' - Clive Davis, The Times

'The Windrush generation's voices are rarely heard, but Grant's anthology is informative and funny, a well-researched window into a vanished world.' - Sarah Hughes, i

'[An] impressive work of oral history.' - BBC History