Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

Nobody articulates better than Phillips, who was born in St Kitts in the West Indies and raised in Leeds, the pain of leaving, the necessity for flight and the abandonment of ties. In novel after novel, he has quarried moving stories of the diaspora, tracing lives back to the point where home meant home. His overarching theme is cultural and social dislocation, particularly the migratory experience, whether it be as a result of the slave trade or through economic necessity -- or because of a repressive regime. All amount to much the same thing. To leave home other than through personal desire is something nobody considers.

--From Alan Taylor's review of Caryl Phillips's new novel, A Distant Shore, published in yesterday's Sunday Herald.