Shortlisted for the 1993 Man Booker Prize and winner of the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Award, Crossing the River is an ambitious and powerful evocation of 250 years of the African diaspora. Born on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts and raised in England, award-winning writer Caryl Phillips (now based in the United States), author of A Distant Shore and Dancer in the Dark, crafts a singular narrative and balances a brilliant array of voices to tell the story of a family torn apart by slavery. In 1753, a time of poor harvests and despair, three brothers are sold and delivered to an English slave ship bound for America. Through the journeys of the three brothers, symbolically separated in time, on their distinct journeys, in different eras and continents, we also follow the story of all the children of slavery. Nash is a returnee in the 1830s. Raised as a Christian, skilled in writing and reading, he is sent to Liberia by his former master. But upon arriving in that territory, supposedly his homeland, he has difficulty adapting to the climate and living with people so different from himself. Torn from Africa as a boy, he no longer recognizes it as his home. Martha, at the end of the same century, finds herself separated from her daughter and husband, sold to other territories. Risking the journey, now a certain age, to the American West, she frees herself from slavery, but not from the weight of all she suffered. Travis is an American soldier stationed in a British village during World War II, who wins the heart of a married, white Englishwoman, with whom he has a son and dreams of a life together free from the judgments of the past. These three remarkable stories, combined with the occasional laments of a father who had to sell his own children and the travelogue of a slave trader, form the so-called "choir of many voices." Spanning different continents and generations, Caryl Phillips reminds us of two and a half centuries of a story that will never be forgotten.
