Crossing the River

From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa. It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant range of voices and narrative techniques, Caryl Phillips folows these exiles across the river that separates continents and centuries.

Phillips's characters include a freed slave who journeys to Liberia as a missionary in the 1830s; a pioneer woman seeking refuge from the white man's justice on the Colorado frontier; and an African-American G.I. who falls in love with a white Englishwoman during World War II. Together these voices make up a "many-tongued chorus" of common memory--and one of the most stunning works of fiction ever to address the lives of black people severed from their homeland.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 01/15/1995
ISBN: 9780679757948
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.43lbs
Size: 8.01h x 5.18w x 0.57d

Review Citations: Booklist 02/15/1998 pg. 979
Publishers Weekly 12/19/1994