[2] An autobiographical coming-of-age novel, set in the 1930s–'40s in Carrington Village, Barbados, where the author was born and raised,[3] In the Castle of My Skin follows the events in the life of a young boy named G, taking place against the background of dramatic changes in the society in which he lives.

In the Castle of My Skin has been characterised by Sandra Pouchet Paquet as an "autobiographical novel of childhood and adolescence written against the anonymity and alienation from self and community the author experienced in London at the age of twenty-three.

Nor was there, at the time of writing, any conscious effort on my part to emphasise the dimension of cruelty that had seduced, or driven, black people into such lasting bonds of illusion.

I still shared in that innocence that had socialised us into seeing our relations to empire as a commonwealth of mutual interests....[9]In the Castle of My Skin has been widely praised and analysed since its first publication, receiving more critical attention than any of Lamming's other works.

[10] Introducing the American edition, Richard Wright referred to "Lamming's quietly melodious prose",[11] while Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o saw the book as "a study of colonial revolt" and "one of the great political novels in modern 'colonial' literature".