Although marketed as a novel, Caryl Phillips’s "Foreigners" eludes easy categorization.

The 2007 book, reprinted this month in paperback (Vintage: $14.95), is as much biography and historical essay as it is fiction. "Foreigners" presents lightly fictionalized accounts of three black men living in Britain at different points in the past 200 years.

As the title implies, each of these men struggles to find a sense of identity as a 'foreigner' in Britain. Phillips describes the lives of Francis Barber, the Jamaican manservant to 18th century author Samuel Johnson; Randolph Turpin, the British-born boxer and 1951 world middleweight champion; and David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway living in Leeds in the 1950s and 60s, who becomes the target of police brutality.

It is through the portrayal of these three men that Phillips is able to create a fragmented history of black life in Britain. As he is depicting his three central figures, Barber, Turpin and Oluwale, Phillips weaves in background on British immigration from the West Indies and Africa and the influence of industry on the black labor force. Thus, without fully integrating the three distinct segments of "Foreigners," Phillips is able to illustrate how these three mens’ lives demonstrate the progress — or lack thereof — of race relations in Britain.

Phillips himself was born in St. Kitts, West Indies, and brought up in England, where he attended Oxford. He has taught at universities in Ghana, Barbados, Singapore, India and the United States, where he is currently a professor at Yale. Given this illustrious and diverse background, it seems Phillips is the ideal candidate to explore the issues of national and racial identity that are so fundamental to "Foreigners."

And yet, the British author is not heavy-handed in conveying an argument or judgment. "Foreigners" simply provides three loosely-related histories of black men in Britain and leaves it to the reader to put together the pieces and draw conclusions.

A veteran author with eight previous novels and three works of nonfiction, Phillips employs an impressive, often-overwhelming range of narrative techniques in "Foreigners." The story of Francis Barber is told in stiff, 18th-century-style prose from the first-person perspective of a journalist friend of Samuel Johnson, while the boxer Randolph Turpin is depicted from a matter-of-fact third person perspective. Most abstractly, Oluwale is described using a collage of shifting first-person accounts and historical citation. While "Foreigners" certainly demonstrates the scope of Phillips’ ability as a writer, this multi-modal style seems unnecessary and largely convolutes the three plots.

Despite its less-than-cohesive construction, Foreigners is the product of extensive historical research that Phillips artfully fuses with storytelling to create a book that is both informative and entertaining. With a dozen books and numerous literary awards to his credit, Caryl Phillips is an inventive author whose fiction explores issues of pressing importance and begs to be read.

Reach reporter Joe Darda at arts@dailyuw.com.