Natives of My Person

George Lamming--one of the Caribbean's most powerful literary voices, championed by Richard Wright and Jean-Paul Sartre--reimagines the age of European exploration in a work that stands as one of the great political novels of the twentieth century

Under imperial orders, a nameless Commandant sets sail sometime between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, bound for the legendary island of San Cristobal--a place whispered about in maps and myths, promised as a prize of empire. The voyage is meant to secure glory and dominion. Instead, it begins to unravel.

As weeks at sea stretch into obsession, the expedition becomes a dangerous test of authority and belief. The Commandant's power is absolute yet increasingly fragile; his crew is caught between obedience and doubt. What begins as a mission of discovery turns into a voyage haunted by fear, desire, and the unspoken violence at the heart of conquest.

Told through shifting perspectives and charged with poetic intensity, Natives of My Person plunges readers inside the imperial imagination at the moment it begins to crack. George Lamming transforms the historical voyage into a gripping psychological drama--one that exposes the ambitions, illusions, and brutal consequences of empire. Urgent, unsettling, and fiercely original, Natives of My Person, Lamming's masterpiece, reveals how conquest reshapes not only the world, but the minds that seek to rule it.

"George Lamming is not so much a novelist as a chronicler of secret journeys to the innermost regions of the West Indian psyche. . . an uninhibited journey to the heart of the colonizer." --The New York Times

Author: George Lamming
Publisher: Outsider Editions
Published: 07/14/2026
Pages: 496
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.95lbs
Size: 7.40h x 4.90w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780385552202

About the Author
GEORGE LAMMING (1927-2022) was a novelist, essayist, and poet. Lamming was born and raised in Barbados but worked as a teacher in Trinidad before settling in the UK. His teaching career included posts as distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and visiting professor at Brown University. Among his books are In the Castle of My Skin (1953), The Emigrants (1954), Of Age and Innocence (1958), The Pleasures of Exile (1960), and Natives of My Person (1972). Lamming's first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, won the Somerset Maugham Award; in 1954, Lamming was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2008, Lamming was honored with an Order of the Caribbean Community (OCC) to acknowledge "fifty-five years of extraordinary engagement with the responsibility of illuminating Caribbean identities, healing the wounds of erasure and fragmentation."