First published in 1972, The Forsaken Lover draws upon Chris Searle's experience as an English teacher in a secondary school in Tobago to focus upon the deep problems of identity encountered by black people having to use the white man's language. He shows how the white man's language is primarily interested in vindicating the white man's pride and culture, and denying the black man his true autonomy. Black children are still being educated within a cultural context which denies them their own identity - in order to succeed they must become as white as possible. In the Forsaken Lover (the title comes from a poem written by a West Indian girl). Chris Seale presents a lively and direct account of his experience. The book is full of the children's own writing - poetry, prose, drama - and, by referring to their words, Searle urges the need for change in policies and attitudes of language and education. The immediate context is Caribbean, but the issues are common to all societies where differences of colour, class and environment exist. The book will be of interest to students of race and ethnic relations, education, linguistics and public policy.

'Lightning of Your Eyes' is a selection of poems written during 40 years of teaching and travelling in Britain, Africa and the Caribbean, celebrating language and education, cricket and revolution.

Forward Groove is a powerfully eclectic survey of recorded jazz from 1923 to 2008, seeking to show jazz as a commentary on the social world of some of its finest musicians, from the great migrations north to Chicago and New York in the twenties and thirties, the campaigns against lynching and Jim Crow racism; the Civil Rights protests and the Vietnam anti-war movement of the fifties and sixties, to the South African anti-apartheid struggles in the sixties and seventies. The jazz art, insists Searle, is anything but mere entertainment: it is part of a culture of resistance, a music striving to build a framework of social and political justice. Searle shows that a vital dimension of jazz has always been to create a better, more joyous world, from Louis Armstrong's 'Coal Cart Blues', the lyrics of Bessie Smith and the Harlem rhapsodies of Duke Ellington, to Charlie Parker's 'Now's the Time', the new sounds of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman and the commitment of Archie Shepp, and on to the contemporary Palestinian cry of Gilad Atzmon's alto saxophone.