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No Telephone to Heaven

Author Michelle Cliff
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Paperback
$18.00 US
Penguin Adult HC/TR | Plume
On sale Mar 01, 1996 | 224 Pages | 9780452275690
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A brilliant Jamaican-American writer takes on the themes of colonialism, race, myth, and political awakening.

Originally published in 1987, this critically acclaimed novel is the continuation of the story that began in Abeng following Clare Savage, a mixed-race woman who returns to her Jamaican homeland after years away. In this deeply poetic novel, Clare must make sense of her middle-class childhood memories in contrast with another side of Jamaica which she is only now beginning to see: one of extreme poverty. And Jamaica—almost a character in the book—comes to life with its extraordinary beauty, coexisting with deep human tragedy.
 
Through the course of the book, Clare sees the violence that rises out of extreme oppression, the split loyalties of a colonized person, and what it means to be neither white nor Black in that environment. The result is a deeply moving, canonical work.
Michelle Cliff (1946-2016) was a Jamaican-American author whose writing explored colonialism and racism. Her body of work includes novels, Abeng, its sequel, No Telephone to Heaven, Free Enterprise, and Into the Interior; short story collections, The Store of a Million Items and Bodies of Water; and poetry collections, The Land of Look Behind and Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise. View titles by Michelle Cliff

About

A brilliant Jamaican-American writer takes on the themes of colonialism, race, myth, and political awakening.

Originally published in 1987, this critically acclaimed novel is the continuation of the story that began in Abeng following Clare Savage, a mixed-race woman who returns to her Jamaican homeland after years away. In this deeply poetic novel, Clare must make sense of her middle-class childhood memories in contrast with another side of Jamaica which she is only now beginning to see: one of extreme poverty. And Jamaica—almost a character in the book—comes to life with its extraordinary beauty, coexisting with deep human tragedy.
 
Through the course of the book, Clare sees the violence that rises out of extreme oppression, the split loyalties of a colonized person, and what it means to be neither white nor Black in that environment. The result is a deeply moving, canonical work.

Author

Michelle Cliff (1946-2016) was a Jamaican-American author whose writing explored colonialism and racism. Her body of work includes novels, Abeng, its sequel, No Telephone to Heaven, Free Enterprise, and Into the Interior; short story collections, The Store of a Million Items and Bodies of Water; and poetry collections, The Land of Look Behind and Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise. View titles by Michelle Cliff

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