DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Brit(ish)

On Race, Identity and Belonging

Afua Hirsch author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Vintage Publishing

Published:4th Oct '18

Should be back in stock very soon

Brit(ish) cover

The Sunday Times bestseller that reveals the uncomfortable truth about race in Britain today - and calls for urgent change

From Afua Hirsch - co-presenter of Samuel L. Jackson's major BBC TV series Enslaved - the Sunday Times bestseller that reveals the uncomfortable truth about race and identity in Britain today.

You're British.

Your parents are British.

Your partner, your children and most of your friends are British.

So why do people keep asking where you're from?

We are a nation in denial about our imperial past and the racism that plagues our present. Brit(ish) is Afua Hirsch's personal and provocative exploration of how this came to be - and an urgent call for change.

'The book for our divided and dangerous times'
David Olusoga

Brit(ish) is a wonderful, important, courageous book, and it could not be more timely: a vital and necessary point of reference for our troubled age in a country that seems to have lost its bearings. It’s about identity and belonging in 21st-century Britain: intimate and troubling; forensic but warm, funny and wise. -- Philippe Sands
Brit(ish) brings together a thoughtful, intelligent, accessible, informative investigation on Britain as a nation not only in the midst of an identity crisis but in denial of what it has been and still is. -- Dolly Alderton
Memoir, social analysis and an incisively argued challenge to unconscious biases: this is a truly stunning book on racial identity by a remarkable woman. -- Helena Kennedy
[A] bracing and brilliant exploration of national identity … Through her often intensely personal investigations, she exposes the everyday racism that plagues British society, caused by our awkward, troubled relationship to our history, arguing that liberal attempts to be colour-blind have caused more problems than they have solved. A book everyone should read: especially comfy, white, middle-class liberals. -- Caroline Sanderson * The Bookseller, Editor's Choice *
This is less a polemic about the past than an attempt to illuminate the problems of the present. Hirsch is exacting in her observations of how this history manifests itself today... This is a fierce, thought-provoking and fervent take on the most urgent questions facing us today. -- Diana Evans * Financial Times *

  • Short-listed for IBW Book Award 2019 (UK)
  • Long-listed for Jhalak Prize 2019 (UK)

ISBN: 9781784705039

Dimensions: 196mm x 126mm x 32mm

Weight: 280g

384 pages