The Pleasures of Exile, originally published in 1960, is a classic of Caribbean disapora writing. George Lamming is one of the major figures in late twentieth century literature: his novels - including In the Castle of My Skin (1953) - were part of the social, cultural, and political revolution of modern Black writing. This book was Lamming’s first work of non-fiction. Written in 1960 during his self-imposed exile in Britain from his native Caribbean, Lamming explores many questions and themes of identity formation. Ranging broadly over cultural politics, he incorporates memoirs of his own experience of exile, as well as his travels across the Caribbean, West Africa and the USA. Drawing upon Shakespeare’s The Tempest and C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, as well as his own fiction and poetry, Lamming deftly locates the reader in a specific intellectual and cultural domain while conjuring a rich and varied spectrum of physical, intellectual, psychological and cultural responses to colonialism. This new edition, with a foreword by Bill Schwartz, makes a great introduction to a writer who was always far ahead of his time: written before the term ‘post-colonial’ was invented, the book explores the key issues that have become central to studies of modern literature today, including the politics of migration, cultural hybridity and minority discourse.