Audiobooks Narrated by Colin Grant

I'm Black So You Don't Have to Be: A Memoir in Eight Lives

Brought to you by Penguin. '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 small-time criminal 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 black British experience. Written 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 a unforgettable exploration of family, identity, race and generational change. © Colin Grant 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Colin Grant (Author), Colin Grant (Narrator)

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Homecoming: Voices of the Windrush Generation

Brought to you by Penguin. When Colin Grant was growing up in Luton in the 1960s, he learned not to ask his Jamaican parents why they had emigrated to Britain. 'We're here because we're here,' his father would say. 'You have some place else to go?' But now, seventy years after the arrival of ships such as the Windrush, this generation of pioneers are ready to tell their stories. 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. (c) 2019, Colin Grant (P) 2019 Penguin Audio

Colin Grant (Author), Colin Grant, Debra Michaels, John Sackville, Kristin Atherton, Leemore Marrett, Leemore Marriott (Narrator)

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