SOURCE: A review of A State of Independence, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 6, 1986, p. 3.

In the following review, Eder finds "a singular freshness" in Phillips's characters in A State of Independence.

From the time he lands in St. Kitts, the Caribbean island he left 20 years earlier for a scholarship in Britain, Bertram Francis is assaulted by the heat.

He feels it at every moment and in every movement—this native, returned from what was to have been a brilliant future but turned out to be two decades of improvisation in London's West Indian slums.

Now it is independence eve in St. Kitts. Bertram is back, not as the successful lawyer and future judge that scholarship boys hoped to become in the old days of the Queen, but with a little money and vague hopes of finding a place.

But he sweats all the time. He changes...