Phillips suggests that Emily’s mental decline has as much to do with her father as it does with tuberculosis, for we see a father who values his only son, Branwell, more than he does his three daughters, so much so that at one point he tries to turn Emily into Branwell’s substitute by teaching her how to shoot a pistol.

Here the delirious Brontë confuses the details of her novel “Wuthering Heights” with her life at home with her father and two sisters. One is told through the consciousness of Emily Brontë as she suffers through her last days. Two additional stories are sandwiched inside the Heathcliff narrative. At the heart of Phillips’s book is the widespread (and continuing) abuse of women and children, and he writes sympathetically and powerfully about both. The early pages give us a horrifying depiction of poverty, prostitution, and mental and physical deterioration through the eyes of Heathcliff’s mother, while the final pages depict Heathcliff’s life as an orphan. Earnshaw brings the orphan to his estate in the moors of northern England. Phillips adopts this method again in his new novel, “The Lost Child,” which might best be defined as a riff on “Wuthering Heights.” The book opens and closes by imagining young Heathcliff’s life before Mr. The stories are linked by theme and situation as opposed to setting and plot. Rather than tell one linear story, these later novels bring together several independent narratives set at different places on the globe and at different moments in time. His first two novels were fairly straightforward in style and structure, but with his third, “Higher Ground” (1989), Phillips introduced the more ambitious and unconventional approach he has used ever since. Immigration has been a key topic in Phillips’s work from his very first novel, “The Final Passage” (1985).

Kitts in 1958, but as an infant he left with his parents during the mass migration of people from the Caribbean islands - still colonial subjects - to Britain in the 1950s.

At age 57, Caryl Phillips is seen by many as the father of Afro-British fiction.

Higher ground caryl phillips