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Start giftingA View of the Empire at Sunset
This audiobook uses AI narration.
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Learn moreAward-winning author Caryl Phillips presents a biographical novel of the life of Jean Rhys, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea, which was written as a prequel to Jane Eyre.
Caryl Phillips’ A View of the Empire at Sunset is the sweeping story of the life of the woman who became known to the world as Jean Rhys. Born Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams in Dominica at the height of the British Empire, Rhys lived in the Caribbean for only sixteen years before going to England. A View of the Empire at Sunset is a look into her tempestuous and unsatisfactory life in Edwardian England, 1920s Paris, and then again in London. Her dream had always been to one day return home to Dominica. In 1936 a forty-five-year-old Rhys was finally able to make the journey back to the Caribbean. Six weeks later she boarded a ship for England, filled with hostility for her home, never to return. Phillips’ gripping new novel is equally a story about the beginning of the end of a system that had sustained Britain for two centuries but that wreaked havoc on the lives of all who lived in the shadow of the empire: both men and women, colonizer and colonized.
A true literary feat, A View of the Empire at Sunset uncovers the mysteries of the past to illuminate the predicaments of the present, getting at the heart of alienation, exile, and family by offering a look into the life of one of the greatest storytellers of the twentieth century and retelling a profound story that is singularly its own.
Caryl Phillips is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, including Dancing in the Dark, Crossing the River, Color Me English, and The Lost Child. His novel A Distant Shore won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and his other awards include a Lannan Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Britain’s oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in New York.
Justine Eyre is a classically trained actress who has narrated many audiobooks, earning the prestigious Audie Award for best narration and numerous Earphones Awards. She is multilingual and known for her great facility with accents. She has appeared on stage, with leading roles in King Lear and The Crucible, and has had starring roles in four films on the indie circuit. Her television credits include Two and a Half Men and Mad Men.
Reviews
“Narrator Justine Eyre sounds simultaneously enticing and embittered in Phillips’ interesting novelization of the life of author Jean Rhys. That’s just as it should be, as Rhys was famously troubled and talented…The audio format gives Eyre ample scope to explore warring aspects of Rhys’s personality—sour and alluring, drunk and innocent—and to people the recording with vibrant vocal portraits of English voices, as well as Rhys’ Welsh father and Creole mother, and the many islanders.”
“Two writers haunted by their Caribbean past…[A] remarkable novel…[An] austere, evocative investigation of a life caught ‘somewhere between colored and white.’ It is a novel of acute psychological empathy and understanding.”
“Under [Phillips’] deft hand, the prose subtly implies more than it tells…Phillips illuminates the irony of global race relations.”
“You can taste Rhys, but it’s still Phillips’exotic stew…His narrative is about homeland, family, alienation, loneliness, and need. His Gwennie is a masterfully drawn character, as dissolute, yet as determined, as Rhys’ tragic characters…His sentences are as sharp as etchings in glass.”
“Explores with rigor and artistry the ever-after effects of the toxic double-helix of racism and imperialism embodied in the African diaspora…Phillips’ bravura, empathic, and unnerving performance makes the real-world achievement of his muse all the more surprising and significant.”
“Haunting…Phillips is at his best in this powerful evocation of Rhys’ vision, which illuminates both her time and the present.”
“Phillips traces Rhys’s life from her birth in Dominica to her miserable years in Edwardian England and return in 1936 to her beloved Caribbean home. In the process, he addresses fraught issues of colonization.”
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