the quiet american is a book by which british writer

His hitherto empty life fills up with the subterfuge and entanglements that whirl around him, while he remains the still centre of the house, quiet and observant. Through the protagonist, Haynes, a young middle-class man, we witness the shenanigans of a lively household where small dramas simmer and explode. A captivating social realist novel, it is set in a boarding house in Trinidad, which was then a British colony, although the story isn’t written in relationship to Britain or empire. It’s my proudest achievement of the series because James wrote it in 1928, nearly 100 years ago, and it’s been a buried treasure ever since, only known only to Caribbean literature aficionados. Minty Alley (1936) by CLR James was a great discovery and I was surprised that I’d never come across it before. Our appreciation of literature is deepened when we understand the foundations from which each new generation creates literature anew, but because so much of the body of black British literature hasn’t been taught in schools or universities, or immortalised on television and film, or even been widely or seriously reviewed in the media and academia, it’s as if each new book is published out of a void. And we know that today’s historical novels have antecedents in their earlier counterparts. Ghosts by Dolly Alderton is in conversation with Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones series and all the novels that were published in its wake, just as Ali Smith’s postmodern novels are descendants of Virginia Woolf’s modernist oeuvre. We can trace the literary lineage of Douglas Stuart’s Booker-winning Shuggie Bain back to the works of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh. Publishers, critics and readers will often understand where books sit within their literary contexts and cultural ecosystem. I n today’s culture, it’s as though black British literary history began relatively recently, and new books are published without reference to or knowledge of what has gone before.

The quiet american is a book by which british writer