It’s 1948, haughty Hortense Joseph arrives in London from British colonised Jamaica, with her perfect white gloves and full trunk, she is ready for the ‘motherland’. Brought up with the consciousness that her "golden skin" makes her a superior creature in a country of darker skins, she soon discovers that her qualifications have no meaning in Britain and her status is precisely the same as that of any other black migrant. Similarly, her husband, Gilbert, an RAF man, returns from the war expecting to be received as a hero in the ‘motherland’, but finds his status as a black man in Britain to be second class.

The novel's other two main characters are their English landlady, Queenie, raised as a farmer's daughter, and Bernard, Queenie's mumbling husband, who arrives back from wartime service to find "coons" renting rooms in his house. Unlike her deeply racist spouse, Queenie serves as refreshing break from bigoted English society.