The Atlantic Sound (First Edition)

Liverpool, England; Accra, Ghana; Charleston, South Carolina. These were the points of the triangle forming the major route of the transatlantic slave trade. And these are the cities that acclaimed author Caryl Phillips explores--physically, historically, psychologically--in this wide-ranging meditation on the legacy of slavery and the impact of the African diaspora on the life of a place and its people.

In a brilliantly layered narrative, Phillips combines his own observations with the stories of figures from the past. The experiences of an African trader in nineteenth-century Liverpool are contrasted with Phillips's experience of the city, where, as a Carib-bean black, he is scorned by the city's "native" blacks. His interactions with American Pan-Africanists coming "home" to Ghana (and with those Ghanaians for whom leaving seems the best hope) are paired with the account of a British-trained African minister in eighteenth-century Accra who turned a blind eye to the slave trade flourishing around him. The story of a white judge who disrupted "the natural order" in Charleston by integrating the Democratic primary in 1947 is set against Phillips's search for remnants of the "pest houses" where slaves were "seasoned" be-fore being sold.

Phillips weaves these narrative threads together with acute insight and a novelist's grasp of time, place and character. The result is a provocative and unexpected book, at once historically illuminating and profoundly affecting.

Caryl Phillips was born in St. Kitts, West Indies; his family emigrated to England that same year, and he was brought up in Leeds and educated at Oxford. Phillips has written numerous scripts for film, theater, radio and television. He is the author of one previous book of nonfiction, The European Tribe, and six novels, including Cambridge, Crossing the River and The Nature of Blood. He has received numerous awards--the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize among them. He lives in New York City.

Caryl Phillips's The Final Passage, A State of Independence, The European Tribe, Higher Ground, Cambridge, Crossing the River and The Nature of Blood are available in Vintage paperback.