Every Light in the House Burnin'
About this ebook
Introduction by Kit de Waal
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My dad was a man - most dads are. But my dad had been taught or was shown or picked up that a man was certain things and a woman was others. He was head of a family - a breadwinner. He should go out to work in the morning and come home at night. He had to discipline children and occasionally do things around the home that required some degree of physical strength. A man did not have to be loving and affectionate. A man had to know everything and never be seen not to understand the world. A man would help around the house only when asked but a man always emptied the bins.
My dad was a man and he did what he thought was expected of him. But he couldn't understand when more was demanded. 'What!' he'd say if he had to take any of us to the dentist. 'Cha,' if expected to wash up. And 'Oh my God!' if my mum ever announced that she would not be in so he'd have to look after us.
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'Humorous and moving, unflinching and without sentiment'
Independent
'Well told, does not dodge complexity and rings true'
The Times
About the author
After she passed away on the 14th of February 2019, the Bookseller wrote: 'Andrea Levy will be remembered as a novelist who broke out of the confines assigned to her by prejudice to become a both a forerunner of Black British excellence and a great novelist by any standards.'
Born in England to Jamaican parents who came to Britain in 1948, Andrea Levy wrote the novels that she had always wanted to read as a young woman, engaging books that reflect the experiences of black Britons and at the intimacies that bind British history with that of the Caribbean. She was described by BBC News as 'a writer who tackled important social issues . . . her writing . . . witty, humane and often moving, and full of richly drawn characters'.
She was the author of six books, including SMALL ISLAND, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Whitbread book of the Year, and was adapted for TV and for the stage, by the National Theatre. It was selected by the BBC as one of its '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'. Her most recent novel, THE LONG SONG, won the Walter Scott Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was adapted for TV by the BBC.
