Moses Ascending

Moses Aloetta, the weary guide of The Lonely Londoners, has finally made it. He has bought a house in Shepherd’s Bush and installed himself in the penthouse, hiring a white English servant named Bob and settling down to write his memoirs. But Moses’s ascent is precarious and absurd: the house fills up with illegal immigrants, Black Power activists, and con artists, and Moses finds that owning property in England does not mean England has accepted him.

Why Consider This One

If you have already read The Lonely Londoners or if you prefer your social commentary delivered through satire, Moses Ascending is a sharper, funnier book. Written nearly twenty years after its predecessor, it captures a different moment in the immigrant experience: the 1970s, when the first generation had settled in but the racial landscape had grown more volatile. Selvon turns Moses into a comic anti-hero whose delusions of grandeur are both hilarious and quietly devastating.

The novel also works as a standalone. You do not need to have read The Lonely Londoners to understand Moses or his world, though the contrast between the two books enriches both.

What to Expect

A satirical novel with a first-person narrator who is unreliable in the best possible way. Moses’s voice is grander and more self-important than in the earlier novel, which is the joke. The comedy is broader, the social criticism more pointed, and the portrait of 1970s multicultural London is vivid and specific. Shorter and more tightly structured than The Lonely Londoners, it offers a different angle on the same essential questions about belonging and displacement.