麻豆约拍

17 April 2022

Throughout this year of Platinum Jubilee celebrations, the 麻豆约拍 and The Reading Agency are celebrating 70 great books from across the Commonwealth. Read on to discover more about The Big Jubilee Read selections drawn from 1952 to 1961.

The Palm-Wine Drinkard

by Amos Tutuola, Nigeria, 1952

Tutuola's novel is the phantasmagorical story of an alcoholic man and his search for his dead palm-wine tapster. As he travels through the land of the dead, he encounters a host of supernatural and often terrifying beings - among them a gentleman who returns his body parts to their owners, and the insatiable hungry-creature.

Mixing Yoruba folktales with what T. S. Eliot described as a 'creepy crawly imagination', The Palm-Wine Drinkard is regarded as a seminal work of African literature.

• Author Chigozie Obioma on the The Palm-Wine Drinkard

The Hills Were Joyful Together

by Roger Mais (Jamaica, 1953)

For the poor and black in this starkly brutal novel, little has changed since slavery. Surjue, like others in his Kingston yard, is struggling for survival when he is persuaded to take part in a robbery. He is arrested, tried and sentenced to the brutal world of a Jamaican colonial prison, yet his life outside jail is also a form of imprisonment.

First published in 1953 and set during the Second World War, Mais’s novel catches Jamaica at a point of change as country people flock into Kingston, but few find new beginnings.

• Discover more Jamaican writing (麻豆约拍 Radio 4)

In the Castle of My Skin

by George Lamming (1953, Barbados)

Nine-year-old G. leads a life of quiet mischief, crab catching, teasing preachers and playing among the pumpkin vines. His sleepy fishing village in 1930s Barbados is overseen by the English landlord who lives on the hill, just as their 'Little England' is watched over by the Mother Country. Yet gradually G. finds himself awakening to the violence and injustice that lurk beneath the apparent order of things.

Lyrical and unsettling, Lamming's autobiographical coming-of-age novel is a story of tragic innocence amid the collapse of colonial rule.

My Bones and My Flute

by Edgar Mittelholzer (1955, Guyana)

Only when he is on board a steamer to a remote destination upriver in Guyana does Milton Woodsley realise that there is more to Henry Nevinson’s invitation to spend time with his family in their jungle cottage. Milton, an artist, thinks he has been invited to do some paintings for Nevinson, and possibly be thrust into the company of their daughter, Jessie. But when the Nevinsons mention a flute player that no one else can hear, Woodsley begins to realise that something else is afoot.

Mittelholzer's 1955 novel, subtitled “A Ghost Story in the Old-fashioned Manner”, combines tongue-in-cheek wit with genuine terror and a stark message about the need to exorcise the crimes of slavery.

The Lonely Londoners

by Sam Selvon (1956, Trinidad and Tobago)

At Waterloo Station, hopeful new arrivals from the West Indies step off the boat train, ready to start afresh in 1950s London. There, homesick Moses Aloetta, who has already lived in the city for years, meets Henry 'Sir Galahad' Oliver and shows him the ropes. In this strange, cold and foggy city where the natives can be less than friendly at the sight of a black face, has Galahad met his Waterloo?

Selvon’s novel celebrates a cohort of lonely Londoners who learn to survive and then come to love the heady excitements of their new home.

• A 1959 麻豆约拍 Caribbean Service pamphlet called (The British Library)

The Guide

by R.K. Narayan (1958, India)

Raju used to be India's most corrupt tourist guide. His first stop after his release from prison is the barber's shop. He then decides to take refuge in an abandoned temple, where a peasant mistakes him for a holy man. Gradually, he begins to play the part, so God himself intervenes to put Raju's new holiness to the test.

The Guide is one of 22 books, written over 60 years, in which Narayan brings the fictional town of Malgudi to life.

• , the real place which inspired Narayan's Malgudi (The Guardian)

To Sir, With Love

by E.R. Braithwaite (1959, Guyana)

In 1945, Rick Braithwaite, a smart, highly educated ex-RAF pilot, looks for a job in British engineering. He is shocked to realise that, as a black man from British Guiana, no one will employ him because of the colour of his skin. In desperation he turns to teaching, taking a job in a tough East End school, and left to govern a class of unruly teenagers. With no experience or guidance, he attempts to instil discipline, confound prejudice and ultimately, to teach.

Braithwaite’s autobiographical novel inspired a much-loved film starring Sydney Poitier.

Un Nos Ola Leuad (One Moonlit Night)

by Caradog Prichard (1961, Wales)

Prichard’s novel – originally published in Welsh - tells of one boy's journey into the grown-up world. By the light of a full moon, the narrator and his friends Huw and Moi witness a side to their Welsh village life that they had no idea existed, and their innocence is exchanged for the shocking reality of the adult world.

One Moonlit Night is one of Britain's most significant and brilliant pieces of fiction, a lost contemporary classic that deserves rediscovery.

• J Elwyn Hughes celebrates the work of Caradog Prichard (麻豆约拍 Radio Cymru)

A House for Mr Biswas

by V.S. Naipaul (1961, Trinidad and Tobago/England)

Mr Biswas has been told since the day of his birth that misfortune will follow him – and so it has. Meaning only to avoid punishment, he causes the death of his father and the dissolution of his family. Wanting simply to flirt with a beautiful woman, he ends up marrying her and relying on her domineering family for support. But in spite of endless setbacks, Mr Biswas is determined to achieve independence, and so he begins his gruelling struggle to buy a home of his own.

A House for Mr Biswas is Nobel Prize in Literature winner V. S. Naipaul's unforgettable masterpiece. Heart-rending and darkly comic, it is a classic that evokes a man's quest for autonomy against the backdrop of post-colonial Trinidad.

• V. S Naipaul discusses A House for Mr Biswas (麻豆约拍 World Service)

Sunlight on a Broken Column

by Attia Hosain (1961, India)

Laila, the orphaned daughter of a distinguished Muslim family, is brought up in her grandfather’s traditional household by her aunts, who keep purdah. At fifteen she moves to the home of her ‘liberal’ but autocratic uncle in Lucknow. As the struggle for Independence sharpens, Laila is surrounded by relatives and university friends caught up in politics and finds herself in her own struggle against tradition.

With its stunning evocation of India, its political insight and unsentimental understanding of the human heart, Sunlight on a Broken Column is a classic of Muslim life.