A remarkable oral history of black postwar British life… Homecoming is an extraordinary and compelling book in which the memories of bus drivers, civil servants, engineers, nurses, RAF and army recruits, teachers, shop stewards and seamstresses jostle with those of journalists, musicians, novelists and poets... The recovered memories in Homecoming are a formidable challenge to those still nostalgic for a lost empire, to all who cling to narrow and parochial definitions of Britishness... The voices in Homecoming sing throughout the book but they also reverberate pain, for so many are recounting stories they do not want to remember.

Grant is the writer to do justice to [the Windrush Generation’s] lives… he has conducted dozens of interviews, dug into the Mass Observation archives, and combed through semi-forgotten oral histories from the 1960s to produce this anthology of submerged lives that prickles with beautiful, comic and brutal details.

Homecoming by Colin Grant is...by turns sad, painful, warm, revelatory and utterly fascinating. I think we would live in a slightly kinder and better country if everyone read [it].

Drawing on scores of first-hand accounts, Colin Grant offers oral history at its finest.

Hundreds of first hand interviews, archive footage and memoir extracts of the Windrush Generation, beautifully edited into a patchwork quilt of experience and heritage. It's so powerful hearing these voices direct, making for a hopeful and angry, joyful and tear-jerking read.

[Grant] lets people speak for themselves… there is much to enjoy. Some of the memories are painful, some are joyous, others are much more ambivalent.

The Windrush generation’s voices are rarely heard, but Grant’s anthology is informative and funny, a well-researched window into a vanished world.

[An] impressive work of oral history.

Colin Grant has interviewed and collected nearly 200 voices from [the Windrush] era, from all walks of life, including policemen and fascists. It's quite a feat.

The structure of Homecoming gives its subjects space to speak for themselves, with each vignette providing a glimpse into little known history… Grant’s collection of voice…exposes effectively the cruel logic of Britain’s legacy of domination.

Interesting and nuanced.

[A] superb oral history… Interspersed with social commentary and pages of sprightly autobiography.

In Homecoming… Colin Grant collates fragments from several hundred interviews, first-hand and archival, with a cross-section of Caribbean immigrants to Britain from the 1940s and early 60s, and allows his subjects to speak for themselves in idiosyncratic statements that refuse to be co-opted into a generalized account of immigrant experience… A fascinatingly varied tapestry emerges of why people came, what they made of it when they got here, and how they related both their Caribbeanness and their blackness.

Homecoming is an important book which records the voice of a generation as they fade into history... here we can listen to that generation telling its story in its own words.

[Homecoming] artfully break the silence surrounding these unheralded lives [of the Windrush generation] and is essential reading for those who wish to know and honour them

An extraordinarily detailed and diverse portrait of the Windrush generation through oral histories

This is a first global history of Europe's most famous and durable dynasty, chronicling its exploits with great panache over nearly a millennium of rule across wide swathes of the continent and beyond. His text is accessible and entertaining, his ready wit providing a delectable counterpoint to the notorious humourlessness of so many of the dynasts he examines.

An engaging combination of fast-flowing narrative and insightful analysis.

Its pleasures are slow, cumulative and utterly absorbing, it would be the perfect choice for a holiday with long stretches of reading time… A wonderful meditation on the half-truths and half-lights that make up our understanding of a life

An absolute masterpiece. A book bursting with love – love lost and love found, love misunderstood, unsaid and denied. I was spellbound by Laura Cumming’s warm, intelligent, searching voice and her intense scrutiny of images to reveal the unexpected and make us think again. I am in complete awe. A beguilingly lovely book – as big as the sea

An absolutely utterly transfixing narrative which I could hardly bear to leave in order to go to sleep at night and which I could not wait to wake up to in the morning, writing of such sublime beauty that I delighted in page after page, and above all a story of such emotional power, not only about Laura’s mother, but also about Laura herself, that sometimes I found myself putting my copy down just to take a moment to breathe

An intricately structured and perfectly written swirl of memoir, history and art: the prose equivalent of beautifully marbled paper. I adored it

A true masterpiece: an unveiling of family secrets written in prose of the utmost beauty, and an astonishing act of filial love. Read it!

Exquisitely written, compelling and painful

[An] intriguing and beautiful book… Cumming summons a novelist’s skill, making it impossible to stop reading the unravelling story. Every chapter ends with a new discovery, or the potential for one, and right up to the very last page the serpentine revelations twist like an anaconda

Haunting, luminous and revelatory… one of the best memoirs in recent years

[A] compelling, beautifully written book… Chapter by chapter, Cumming slowly pieces together an authentic portrait of her ancestors, a paean dedicated lovingly to her mother

Extraordinary… It is a scrupulously, luminously empathic book, and the work of a masterful storyteller

A remarkable new book, which blends mystery, memoir, art criticism and Lincolnshire history… The story may be unique but the themes are universal

A profound and beautiful book… Cumming illuminate the darkness of secrets, shame and betrayal and their effects in a riveting book

[An] excellent mystery memoir

The story, beautifully written, is enriched by Cumming’s skill at making pictures speak

On Chapel Sands is as compelling as any detective novel of the golden age. The rigour and pace of the writing, its themes of mistaken identity, confinement and sexual deceit are reminiscent of Josephine Tey

Laura Cumming writes very beautifully and I take real pleasure in the prose

On Chapel Sands is beautifully written, immersive and moving – and it’s one of the finest books of the year

A haunting investigation into family trauma and secrets from a forgotten England that turns out to lie closer to the surface than anyone suspected. Turning detective, she [Laura Cumming] interrogates old snapshots with the forensic skill of a professional art critic

On Chapel Sands starts by seeming to be about one kind of mystery but soon starts being about another, much more profound one… the subtlety and suspense of the narrative lies in the way Cumming allows details about their relationship to emerge slowly, like a photograph socking in developing fluid

With her critic’s eye, Cumming turns detective to investigate who took her mother and tell a pacy story about relationships, pride and the ramifications of what goes unsaid

In a year strong in ingenious memoir, Laura Cumming’s On Chapel Sands…stood out, not just for its great storytelling but for Cumming’s wonderful ability to bring to life a Lincolnshire coastal community…its moods, characters and toxic secret-harbouring machinery

This beautifully written memoir of family mystery proved one of the surprise hits of 2019

[A] twisting literary mystery that also serves as a deeply moving love letter

A complex story of family secrets, beautifully written, and illustrated

A beautiful, multi-layered story full of lost love, human motivation and tender secrets

[A] bewitching blend of history and mystery

A scrupulous work of storytelling, radiant with empathy and filial affection