A Financial Times Music Book of the Year 2023

'Key to understanding black British history' - Sunday Times
'Sharp and still relevant' - Zadie Smith

Recognized as one of the great poets of modern times, and as a deeply respected and influential political and cultural activist and social critic, Linton Kwesi Johnson is also a prolific writer of non-fiction. In Time Come, he selects some of his most powerful prose  book and record reviews published in newspapers and magazines, lectures, obituaries and speeches  for the first time. Written over many decades, it is a body of work that draws creatively and critically on Johnsons own Jamaican roots and on Caribbean history to explore the politics of race that continue to inform the Black British experience.

Ranging from reflections on the place of music in Caribbean and Black British culture as a creative, defiant response to oppression, to his penetrating appraisals of music and literature, and including warm tributes paid to the activists and artists who inspired him to find his own voice as a poet and compelled him to contribute to the struggle for racial equality and social justice, Time Come is a panorama of an exceptional life. A collection that ventures into memoir, it underscores Johnsons enduring importance in Britains cultural history and reminds us of his brilliant, unparalleled legacy.

With an introduction by Paul Gilroy, author of There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack
'A mosaic of wise, urgent and moving pieces' - Kit de Waal
'As necessary as ever' - The Observer
'A book to be savoured and re-read' - Derek Owusu
'An outstanding collection' - Caryl Phillips
'A necessary book from a writer who continues to inspire' - Yomi Sode
'Incisive, engaging, fearless' - Gary Younge

This biography of Mayer Matalon, an influential Jewish Jamaican, traces his path from humble origins to innovator, public servant, political insider, and leader of his familys conglomerate, from the 1940s to the end of the twentieth century. Mayer Matalon was not born into the Jewish-Jamaican elite who traced their ancestry in Jamaica back hundreds of years and who were successful entrepreneurs, prominent intellectuals, and politicians. Mayer Matalons father, Joseph, was one a handful of Jews who came to Jamaica in the wave of turn-of-the-century Levantine emigration, and his mother, Florizel Madge Matalon, was a young, beautiful, poor Jewish-Jamaican girl. A failed businessman, Josephs legacy was eleven children who created their own legacy in Jamaican business and politics.

The Matalon siblings built a conglomerate, venturing into businesses and experimenting with business models that had never been tried in Jamaica, enjoying success for the first twenty years, struggling to retain viability for the next twenty years, and fighting to keep the family together throughout.

Matalon rose to wealth and prominence through his talent for numbers, his innovative ideas, and his extraordinary emotional intelligence. He was one of Prime Minister Michael Manleys closest confidantes, in and out of power, and he advised every Jamaican premier and prime minister from Norman Manley to Bruce Golding, with only one exception. That one exception resulted in a sidelining that had a blowback that set Jamaica back decades and that sealed his familys businesss fate.

This is a story of race, class, and power in postcolonial Jamaica. Through the lens of Mayer Matalons life, the book outlines Jamaicas political and economic trajectory over the sixty years before and after independence. This biography peels back the surface layers of the many citations and public accolades, and goes beyond the often uninformed speculation on the Matalons beginnings, revealing in rich detail the unusual life of an extraordinary Jamaican.