Defiant, humorous, empathetic and insightful, 'Not Quite Right For Us' pierces through the hierarchical mechanics of class, race, gender. A celebration of outsiderness and an ode to otherness, 'Not Quite Right For Us' is a singular collection of stories, essays and poems by a dynamic mix of established and surging voices alike, edited by Sharmilla Beezmohun and including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Aminatta Forna, Xiaolu Guo, Johny Pitts, Rishi Dastidar, Tim Wells and Rafeef Ziadah. This remarkable anthology marks the tenth anniversary of the live-literature organisation co-founded by Sharmilla, Speaking Volumes. Part cri du coeur, part warning shot, part affirmation, this is the book we need now.

'A natural storyteller. This is a compelling and charming read' Bernardine Evaristo, Booker Prize-winning author of GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER 'I'm black, so you don't have to be,' Colin Grant's uncle Castus used to tell him. For Colin, born in Britain to Jamaican parents, things were supposed to be different. If he worked hard and became a doctor, he was told, his race would become invisible; he would shake off the burden he believed his parents' generation had carried. The reality turned out to be very different. This is a memoir told through a series of intimate intergenerational portraits. We meet Grant's mother Ethlyn, disappointed by working-class life in Luton, who dreams of returning to Jamaica; his father Bageye, a maverick and small-time ganja dealer with a violent temper; his sister Selma, who refashioned herself as an African princess; his great uncle Percy, estranged from his family through his own pride. Each character we meet is navigating their own path. Each life informs Grant's own shifting sense of his identity. Collectively these stories build into poignant and insightful testimony of the black British experience. Written with the intrigue, nuance, beauty and wit of short stories, and with the veracity and painful revelation of memoir, I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be is an unforgettable exploration of family, identity, race and generational change.

"A natural storyteller. This is a compelling and charming read." Bernardine Evaristo 'I'm black, so you don't have to be,' Colin Grant's uncle Castus used to tell him. For Colin, born in Britain to Jamaican parents, things were supposed to be different. If he worked hard and became a doctor, he was told, his race would become invisible; he would shake off the burden he believed his parents' generation had carried. The reality turned out to be very different. This is a memoir told through a series of intimate intergenerational portraits. We meet Grant's mother Ethlyn, disappointed by working-class life in Luton, who dreams of returning to Jamaica; his father Bageye, a maverick and small-time ganja dealer with a violent temper; his sister Selma, who refashioned herself as an African princess; his great uncle Percy, estranged from his family through his own pride. Each character we meet is navigating their own path. Each life informs Grant's own shifting sense of his identity. Collectively these stories build into poignant and insightful testimony of the black British experience. Written with the intrigue, nuance, beauty and wit of short stories, and with the veracity and painful revelation of memoir, I'm Black So You Doin't Have to Be is an unforgettable exploration of family, identity, race and generational change.

New in paperback, this groundbreaking biography captures the full sweep and epic dimensions of Marcus Garvey's life, the dazzling triumphs and the dreary exile. As Grant shows, Garvey was a man of contradictions: a self-educated, poetry-writing aesthete and unabashed propagandist, an admirer of Lenin, and a dandy given to elaborate public displays. Above all, he was a shrewd promoter whose use of pageantry evoked a lost African civilization and fired the imagination of his followers. Negro With a Hat restores Garvey to his place as one of the founders of black nationalism and a key figure of the 20th century.
"A searching, vivid, and (as the title suggests) complex account of Garvey's short but consequential life."
--Steve Hahn, The New Republic
"The story of Marcus Garvey, the charismatic and tireless black leader who had a meteoric rise and fall in the late 1910s and early '20s, makes for enthralling reading, and Garvey has found an engaging and objective biographer in Colin Grant.... Grant's book is not all politics, ideology, money and lawsuits. It is also an engrossing social history.... Negro With a Hat is an achievement on a scale Garvey might have appreciated."
--New York Times Book Review
"Dazzling, definitive biography of the controversial activist who led the 1920s 'Back to Africa' movement.... Grant's learned passion for his subject shimmers on every page. A riveting and well-wrought volume that places Garvey solidly in the pantheon of important 20th-century black leaders."
--Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
"This splendid book is certain to become the definitive biography. Garvey was a dreamer and a doer; Grant captures the fascination of both."
--Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"Grant's strength lies in his ability to re-create political moods and offer compelling sketches of colorful individuals and their organizations.... An engaging and readable introduction to a complicated and contentious historical actor who, in his time, possessed a unique capacity to inspiredevotion and hatred, adulation and fear."
--Chicago Tribune
"A monumental, nuanced and broadly sympathetic portrait."
--Financial Times

The arrival of HMT Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks, Essex in 1948 was turned into a significant event by the British media but it is only one small part of a bigger story. Windrush looks at the movement of people after the Second World War in Britain. In an accessible and child-friendly way, the book explores the treatment of Black people, the struggles they faced and those they continue to face as well as celebrating the legacy of the Windrush generation in modern Britain. You can build your own encyclopedia with A Ladybird Book. Other titles available in this series: The Ancient Egyptians Animal Habitats Baby Animals British Kings and Queens Climate Change Electricity The Human Body Insects and Minibeasts Mountains Planet Earth Rainforests Rivers The Romans Sea Creatures The Solar System The Stone Age Trains Trees Volcanoes Weather

Separated from its anchorage in religion, ethics has followed the social sciences in seeing human beings as fundamentally characterized by self-interest, so that altruism is either naively idealistic or arrogantly self-sufficient. Colin Grant contends that, as a modern secular concept, altruism is a parody on the self-giving love of Christianity, so that its dismissal represents a social leveling that loses the depths that theology makes intelligible and religion makes possible. He argues that to dispense with altruism is to dispense with God and with the divine transformation of human possibilities.

A powerful prescient memoir of life in 1970s Britain for a child of Windrush generation parents. 'This book is a classic' Sunday Telegraph To his fellow West Indians who assemble every weekend for the all-night poker game at Mrs Knight's, he is always known as Bageye. There aren't very many black men in Luton in 1972 and most of them gather there: Summer Wear, Pioneer, Anxious, Tidy Boots - each has his nickname. Bageye already finds it a struggle to feed his family on his wage from Vauxhall Motors, but now his wife Blossom has set her heart on her sons going to private school and she will not settle for anything less. This is the story of a father seen through the eyes of his ten-year-old son. It's a wry and gentle comedy about unfulfilling day jobs and late night poker games, of illegal mini-cabs and small-scale drug-dealing. And it is also about a family struggling to belong in post-Windrush Britain and growing up in a vanished world of 1970s suburbia. LOOK OUT FOR COLIN GRANT'S NEW BOOK: Homecoming - the first oral history of the Windrush generation

Separated from its anchorage in religion, ethics has followed the social sciences in seeing human beings as fundamentally characterised by self-interest, so that altruism is either naively idealistic or arrogantly self-sufficient. Colin Grant contends that, as a modern secular concept, altruism is a parody on the self-giving love of Christianity, so that its dismissal represents a social levelling that loses the depths that theology makes intelligible and religion makes possible. The Christian affirmation is that God is characterised by self-giving love (agape), then expected of Christians. Lacking this theological background, the focus on self-interest in sociobiology and economics, and on human realism in the political focus of John Rawls or the feminist sociability of Carol Gilligan, finds altruism naive or a dangerous distraction from real possibilities of mutual support. This book argues that to dispense with altruism is to dispense with God and with the divine transformation of human possibilities.

'A remarkable oral history of black postwar British life... Homecoming is an extraordinary and compelling book' Daily Telegraph Homecoming draws on over a hundred first-hand interviews, archival recordings and memoirs by the women and men who came to Britain from the West Indies between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. In their own words, we witness the transition from the optimism of the first post-war arrivals to the race riots of the late 1950s. We hear from nurses in Manchester; bus drivers in Bristol; seamstresses in Birmingham; teachers in Croydon; dockers in Cardiff; inter-racial lovers in High Wycombe, and Carnival Queens in Leeds. These are stories of hope and regret, of triumphs and challenges, brimming with humour, anger and wisdom. Together, they reveal a rich tapestry of Caribbean British lives. Homecoming is an unforgettable portrait of a generation, which brilliantly illuminates an essential and much-misunderstood chapter of our history. ** A BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week** **A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year**

One day Colin Grant's teenage brother Christopher failed to emerge from the bathroom. His family broke down the door to find him unconscious on the floor. None of their lives were ever the same again. Christopher was diagnosed with epilepsy. In A Smell of Burning Colin Grant tells the remarkable story of this strange and misunderstood disorder. He shows us the famous people with epilepsy like Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc and Vincent van Gogh, the pioneering doctors whose extraordinary breakthroughs finally helped gain an understanding of how the brain works, and, through the tragic tale of his brother, he considers the effect of epilepsy on his own life.

The history of the original Wailers - Tosh, Livingstone and Marley - as never before told. Over one dramatic decade, a trio of Trench Town R&B crooners, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley, swapped their 1960s Brylcreem hairdos and two-tone suits for 1970s battle fatigues and dreadlocks to become the Wailers - one of the most influential groups in popular music. Now one of our best and brightest non-fiction writers examines for the first time the story of the legendary reggae band. Charting their complex relationship, their fluctuating fortunes, musical peak, and the politics and ideologies that provoked their split, Colin Grant shows us why they were not just extraordinary musicians, but also natural mystics. And, following a trail from Jamaica through Europe, America, Africa and back to the vibrant and volatile world of Trench Town, he travels in search of the last surviving Wailer. 'In Grant's hands life in Trench Town in the 1960's is energetic and theatrical, rich in comedy and tragic irony...This brilliant book is not just about Jamaica, but about ourselves' Guardian

This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing's Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Colin Grant challenges the popular use of "myth" as a dismissive designation of the superstitions and falsehoods of "other" cultures. The author maintains that myths occupy a place in our present-day lives that is every bit as important to us as the divinities and heroes of classical antiquity were to the ancients. The myths themselves are in a constant state of flux and transformation. They ebb and flow, both within the context of wider culture and individual experience.

Discover the definitive biography of Marcus Garvey 'Grant is an accomplished storyteller and writes with an elegance leavened by wit and cynicism that makes this book eminently readable' Guardian At one time during the first half of the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey was the most famous black man on the planet. Hailed as both the 'black Moses' and merely 'a Negro with a hat', he masterminded the first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World, began the Universal Negro Improvement Association and captivated audiences with his powerful speeches and audacious 'Back to Africa' programme. But he was to end his life in penury, ignominy and friendless exile, after serving jail time in both the US and Jamaica. With masterful skill, wit and compassion, Colin Grant chronicles Garvey's extraordinary life, the failed business ventures, his misguided negotiations with the Ku Klux Klan, the two wives and the premature obituaries that contributed to his lonely, tragic death. This is the dramatic cautionary tale of a man who articulated the submerged thoughts of an awakening people. 'Engrossing...Writing in a concise, expressive style...drawing on gargantuan research ...Grant show's Garvey's heady triumphs and crushing disappointments, his complexity and his paradoxes' Independent on Sunday

Grant argues that the awkwardness of salvation for recent theology is a symptom and source of ambiguity about God. Erosion by secularization, displacement by alternative "religions, " and the reality of other genuinely religious traditions all challenge the Christian gospel of salvation.