This is the first novel I was nervous about teaching this semester. I knew Anand and Paton would go down pretty easy with my students, but this debut novel by George Lamming, originally published in 1953, is a shaggy dog of a book, with frequent stylistic shifts, and with its main character (only named as G, and loosely based on Lamming himself) often disappearing for multiple chapters at a stretch. Sometimes in this book, loving parents beat their kids, and friends fall out over dumb […]