Small Island is one of the best books that I have read this year.  Get it.  Read it. 

Why is it so good?  It is profoundly written.  The author accurately portrays the perspective of four very different characters: Hortense, a young Jamaican woman who immigrates to England, Gilbert, a young Jamaican man who joins the RAF during WWII to serve in England, an English man, Bernard who serves in India during the war and Queenie, Bernard's wife, who takes in Gilbert and Hortense as boarders.

The novel is not simply about Gilbert and Hortense immigrating to England, the first wave of Jamaicans who would come to transform cities like London, but rather describes in intimate detail how WWII changed so many lives.  Thousands upon thousands of men and women became mobile because of the war or because of changes that occurred shortly after.  The world that emerged after WWII would change England and many other countries forever.  Small Island describes that world on the verge of its transformation into becoming a place in which people who grew up thousands of miles apart on the planet could suddenly impact each others lives, as the characters in this novel do.

Small World is also a great novel because the author accurately describes the immigrants' experience in a new country.  Gilbert and Hortense had spent their entire childhood being schooled in the greatness of the British empire only to arrive in its capital and find the reality of an Empire that was crumbling and fast retreating.
While Hortense and Gilbert were experts in British history, culture and literature, most Britons could not even locate Jamaica on a map.  If you have never had this experience of being an outsider, Small Island will give you a great sense of that reality for many people in Canada, particularly Toronto.

Small Island.  Get it.  Read it.