"Selvon's London works...span a crucial period in the literary and cultural history of black Britain. His experimentations with language and form in his London works were to be a major influence on a later generation of writers as he lifted his immigrant characters out of the stereotypical straitjackets imposed on them and created an alternative way of seeing and reading that world. Selvon's city is a mongrel city, a mishmash of languages, people and identities jangling with each other and vying for a place. It is a world which anticipated by many years the literary visions of a multicultural and postcolonial London created in works such as Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, Diran Adebayo's Some Kind of Black or Monica Ali's Brick Lane."