As suggested by the chapter titles, ‘Leaving Home’, ‘Homeward Bound’, ‘Home’ and ‘Exodus’, Phillips's non-fictional work, The Atlantic Sound (2000), explores not only the complex notion of what constitutes ideas of home, but also the dislocations and discontinuities that have arisen from the historical ‘prism’ of the transatlantic slave trade. Phillips's text structures its exploration of home and exile within the modern condition of displacement and diaspora via a personal quest to three of the most important ‘gateways’ or cities of the triangular slave trade - Liverpool, Accra in Ghana and Charleston - as he repeats the ‘rite of passage’ he made as a child on his journey from the Caribbean to Britain during the 1950s. Despite the similar discomforts and quarrels he experiences as a voyager on this banana boat, Phillips, unlike his parents, is not a bewildered ‘new’ arrivant. For them, as for other post-war West Indian emigrants, such an Atlantic crossing was a journey into the unknown, a prelude to a larger adventure, which Phillips declares ‘would change the nature of British histor’ (AS 4). For his parents, the long arduous journey across the Atlantic to Britain after the Second World war was a journey mitigated by a belief in the ‘mother country's’ desire to welcome and protect the children of its empire, an optimism that was quickly abandoned as West Indian emigrants found that Britain had little desire to ‘embrace’ its colonial offspring. Displaying three flags of identification - the Liberian flag signifying its country of registration, the Costa Rican flag in order to acknowledge the ‘ownership’ of the waters in which it is sailing, and the bright yellow flag marked ‘Del Monte Quality Bananan’ to identify its trade - Phillips's journey on the cargo ship MV Horncap highlights the development in contemporary transatlantic global commercialism as the latter-day ‘produce’, the banana, is transported to Western supermarkets by a crew made up of refugees from Burma.

In the chapter entitled ‘Leaving Home’, Phillips visits Liverpool, one of the most important European cities of the eighteenth-century transatlantic slave trade.