Andrea Levy affirms Toni Morrison's sense that ‘being a black woman writer is not a shallow place but a rich place to write from. It doesn't limit my imagination; it expands it.’ Levy's ‘Caribbean heritage’ is a ‘very rich seam’ for her as a writer; ‘quite simply, the reason that I write,’ she states. The seams she works at in her writing are the imperial and post-imperial formation of Caribbean and British lives and the suturing of the historical wounds of transatlantic plantation slavery and its legacies. Her recent novels Small Island (2004) and The Long Song (2010) have been inspired by commemorative events in Atlantic history: the fiftieth anniversary in 1998 of the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush, usually seen as marking the beginning of post-war West Indian emigration to Britain, and the bicentenary in 2007 of the British abolition of its slave trade respectively. ‘My heritage is Britain's story too. It is time to put the Caribbean back where it belongs – in the main narrative of British history,’ Levy insists.

Drawing on and framing recollection as a method of research and narration, Levy addresses in her fiction how a sharply racialised empire has shaped intimate spheres of her characters’ lives: desire, femininity, masculinity, sexual economies, domesticity and imagined communities. Recollection as a form of historical fiction offers a ‘counter-memory’ of British history and national memory. David Scott, writing on ‘the idea of an archaeology of black memory’, positions ‘counter-memory’ as ‘the moral idiom and semiotic registers of remembering against the grain of the history of New World black deracination, subjection and exclusion … a relation between the idea of an archive, the modalities of memory, the problem of a tradition, and practices of criticism’.

In an interview with Susan Alice Fischer, Levy points to a shift in her creative practice at the turn of the twenty-first century. Her first three novels – Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994), Never Far from Nowhere (1996) and Fruit of the Lemon (1999) – were, she says, ‘about exploring aspects of my life, though in fiction. I didn't research it, obviously; it was there in my head for those three books.’