Sam Selvon’s 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners is a poignant, tragicomic depiction of the experience of the first arrivals in ‘the Ole Brit’n’ from the British territories in the Caribbean. Narrated  from the perspective of ‘Moses’, a veteran Londoner originally from Trinidad, the novel tells of the escapades of a handful of new arrivals in a cold, unfamiliar and frequently hostile city which nonetheless offers possibilities for adventure and self-transformation. One of the first British novels to depict the arrival of Windrush generation, we see in it the combining of Caribbean vernacular with modernist-inspired textual experimentation to create an idiom and narrative form appropriate to documenting the fragmented experiences of this community.