No Telephone to Heaven - by Michelle Cliff (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"The beauty and authority of her writing is coupled in a rare way with profound insight."
--Toni Morrison

"Mesmerizing ... possesses the incantatory power of poetry."
--The New York Times Book Review

"Structurally ambitious and innovative, making tangible through its form a vivid, spiraling tension between past and present ... a triumph of artistic integration, a hard-won harmony between the political and the personal, between realism and the mysteries of the spirit."
--Washington Post Book World

"I am in awe of Michelle Cliff's achievement. The work is lyrical, intelligent, full of a moral passion kept taut and spare and absolutley unsentimental. The range of her knowledge, insight, and compassion is astonishing."
--Janette Turner Hospital

"A tour de force. I very much admire what she does with language, and the fact that she's struggling with central issues of our time. A powerful book, truly a stupendous achievement: the complex sense of Jamaica with its anguish and its beauty. In her generation, Cliff is rare and is already distinguished as a writer of great substance and power."
--Tillie Olsen

About the 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.