Another Man in the Street

Caryl Phillips, who “pits himself against any kind of received wisdom” (London Review of Books), gives us a hypnotic, heartbreaking novel lit by the bright and changing lights of 1960s London. At the height of the Swinging Sixties, Victor Johnson, a young immigrant from the Caribbean, arrives in London with dreams of becoming a journalist in the “mother country.” Instead, he finds work collecting rent for Peter Feldman, a landlord equally kind and unscrupulous, and then falls into a relationship with Peter’s lonely secretary, Ruth, herself a migrant from the north of England. Spanning nearly half a century, and set against the backdrop of a nation that is slowly, reluctantly evolving into a modern, multiracial society, the story unfolds to reveal the truth of both Peter’s tragic background and Ruth’s agonizing secret, and we witness Victor, out of his depth, adjusting to the painful realities of life in his new country. Both epic in its sweep and devastatingly intimate in its portrayal of damaged lives caught between two worlds, Caryl Phillips’s Another Man in the Street lays bare the traumas that often overtake personal relationships in the wake of societal transformation, and the high price of attempting to reinvent oneself.