Concrete Dreams

Concrete Dreams (Peepal Tree Press), by Ferdinand Dennis traverses some forty years of life in Caribbean-shaped Britain, grounded in the disharmonious relationship between brutish Lucas Bostock and his wife, Rhoda. A story of intense familial disenfranchisement, Concrete Dreams is an often-painful exploration of the Windrush era, and the struggle for selfhood and identity it engendered in so many who journeyed under its banner. Dennis writes father-son vicissitudes with an often uncomfortable, but productive intensity: this family’s fracture also exposes the pulsing heart of its individual and intertwined ambitions. Memories of Jamaica intersect with immediacies of London, spliced with grave introspection.