In the time since its initial publication, In the Castle My Skin has come to be considered a classic narrative of the Black colonial experience. This poetic autobiographical novel juxtaposes the undeveloped, unencumbered life of a small Caribbean island with the materialism and anxiety of the twentieth century. Written when Lamming was twenty-three and residing in England, it poignantly chronicles the author’s life from his ninth to his nineteenth year. Through the eyes of a young boy the experiences of colonial education, class tensions, and natural disaster and interpreted and reinterpreted, mediated through the presence of the old villages and friends who leave for the mainland.