The Empire in black and white

Often described as Britain's black Roddy Doyle, Andrea Levy prefers to call herself 'the bastard child of Empire'. 'When I say I'm English, it's not an act of patriotism, it's almost an act of defiance ... I'm the bastard child Britain doesn't really want to acknowledge,' she says.

A child of the Windrush generation - the 492 Jamaican ex-servicemen and women who changed Britain when they migrated on the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 - Levy has been toying with British identity for more than a decade in her four novels. 'All my books have been about trying to understand who I am and the position I'm in,' she says.

She works the themes again in her latest novel, Small Island, which uses four narrative voices to tell the story of two couples, one black, one white, whose lives are brought together by the idea of Empire. Gilbert Joseph's love for the empire compels him to fight for England during the war, then to leave Jamaica in 1948 and sail to London on the SS Empire Windrush to make a new life for himself and his young bride, Hortense. He takes up lodgings in Queenie Bligh's attic, much to the chagrin of the neighbours, who think these 'darkies have come for the teeth and the glasses'.

'People are responding to that whole thing about it not just being about black people but about white people as well. But some are a bit pissed off by that,' says Levy. 'Some people feel I should have been a little harsher, but I don't feel that. I want change, not retribution.

'The arrival of the Windrush in 1948 has now gone down in British history as the moment when multicultural Britain began. I wanted to go back and have a look at that, and what that meant for the people who came, because my dad and my uncle were both on that ship. But I also wanted to look at what it meant for the people they came to.'

While Small Island is an exploration of the moment when Britain is thought to have been forever changed by immigration, it is also about the disintegration and backwash of Empire. 'The British Empire wasn't a cultural exchange, it was an economic exchange. There was no interest particularly in the people and the cultures of those places; it was all about the kind of things you got from them. Nobody ever said we got the finest art in the world from Sarawak, or we got songs and merriment from Jamaica. It was a commercial transaction.'