Edgar 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 Victorian domestic life 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, and his own saving through the power of literature and his desire to be a writer. 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.

Edgar Mittelholzer was born in British Guiana in 1909. He wrote more than twenty novels. He eventually settled in England, where he lived until his death in 1965, a suicide predicted in several of his novels.