Hortense Roberts, one of the novel’s protagonists, is a young Jamaican woman who immigrates to England. Hortense is born out of wedlock to a famous Jamaican bureaucrat, Lovell Roberts, and a penniless maid, Alberta. Raised as an outsider by her father’s cousins, Philip and Martha Roberts who prize status and respectability above all else, Hortense learns to value their world while also feeling insecure about her place in it as a illegitimate child of low birth. As a young woman, she attends a colonial teaching college, where she imbibes the narrative of British colonial superiority. Her craving for respectability and her worship of Britain lead her to immigrate to London, but the hostile and racist society she finds forces her to reevaluate her preconceptions of Britain