Award-winner Phillips moves to Bloomsbury with his first novel in five years

Bloomsbury has nabbed Booker shortlistee Caryl Phillips’ first novel since 2018, which will explore the "realities of cultural displacement".  

Editorial director Allegra Le Fanu bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Georgia Garrett at RCW to Another Man in the Street. Mitzi Angel and Jonathan Galassi at FSG acquired the book in the US from Sarah Burnes at The Gernert Company. Publication is scheduled for early 2025 and will backed by a "major international marketing and publicity campaign".

Novelist, playwright and essayist Phillips is currently a professor of English at Yale University. He was named the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on Granta’s 1993 Best of Young British Writers list. His 1993 novel Crossing the River was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Commonwealth Writers and James Tait Black Memorial awards. 

Another Man in the Street tells the story of Victor "Lucky" Johnson, a young man from the Caribbean who moves to London in the 1960s to become a journalist. The book "shuttles between the end of Victor’s life and his early struggles in London, painting a vivid portrait of a flawed and complex protagonist grappling with the disillusionments of exile—and of a vibrantly alive and rapidly changing London".

It will be Phillips’ first novel with Bloomsbury, though it has published a number of his plays under the Methuen and Oberon lists. Phillips’ last novel, A View of the Empire at Sunset, was released by Vintage in the UK.   

Le Fanu said: "It is a great honour to welcome Caryl Phillips back to Bloomsbury with the magnificent Another Man in the Street. It’s an unforgettable story of loss, displacement and belonging, epic in scope and yet profoundly intimate; and a radical and timely portrait of immigrant London. I can’t wait for the world to meet Lucky Johnson."

Galassi added: "Caryl Phillips is one of the most striking voices in contemporary fiction, portraying the realities of cultural displacement with clear-eyed honesty and empathy."

Phillips said: "Bloomsbury recently published my Collected Radio Plays; however its acquisition of this novel, and the opportunity to work with Allegra Le Fanu on Another Man in the Street, and future books, makes me feel as though I really have returned to a wonderful publishing house that feels both exciting and familiar."