Much of Caryl Phillips’s fiction is imbued with a form of determinism whereby history is meant to repeat itself, especially when it comes to oppression and discrimination. This is particularly visible in his novels Higher Ground (1989), Crossing the River (1993) and The Nature of Blood (2007), which juxtapose but also interweave the lives of individuals separated by time and space, yet experiencing similar predicaments inherited from the past. His protagonists are not completely deprived of free will but their bids for freedom often fail in the face of racial and social pressures that they cannot control. My intention in this paper is to show how this paradoxical combination of dignity and defeat again brands the characters of Phillips’s latest book, Foreigners: Three English Lives, which retraces the tragic lives of three black men who lived in England at different periods yet all saw their liberty to decide curtailed by prejudice, paternalism and their own human weaknesses. The book restores some of these men’s lost self-esteem by providing a rendering, both moving and factual, of their singular life stories which had so far largely remained untold. It also enacts this hymn to difference by boldly mixing fiction and non-fiction, and thereby going beyond another form of determinism, generic this time, which still affects the literary world today.