First published in 1963, and only two years before his tragic suicide by fire, A Swarthy Boy is a remarkably balanced and often good-humoured account of a life born as the dark child to a father who was “a confirmed negrophobe” and a mother who, though “soft and sentimental… to the point of molly-coddling” turned in an instant to a fierce chastiser with a leather thong she named "Tickle Toby" (and aunts and grandmothers to back her up). In this account that takes him to age of twenty in 1929, when he sends of the first bulky manuscript of his never-to-be-published novel, “The Terrible Four”, under the slogan “Victory or Death!”, Mittelholzer offers a beautifully written account of his distinctly eccentric Anglo-Germanic family so enmeshed in their sense of colonial Englishness that they experienced Guyana as an alien and hostile environment; of the dark Victorian domestic interiors of their part of the town of New Amsterdam; and the rigid race and class hierarchies that kept British Guiana hidebound and immobile under a snobbish and uncreative elite, whose attitude to African and Indian Guyanese had been fixed in the periods of slavery and indenture. What saved the youthful Mittelholzer from this colonial stasis was not only his eye for the absurd, his constitutional rebelliousness, but his voracious appetite for books – and his unquenchable desire to become the noted writer, which, against the odds, he triumphantly struggled to become.

With an introduction by Jeremy Poynting and an afterword by Jacqueline Pointer, who was Edgar Mittelholzer's wife at the time he wrote A Swarthy Boy, this edition also includes two autobiographical essays by Mittelholzer and an extract from his travelogue, With a Carib Eye (1958) which offers a rather different view of New Amsterdam.