This article discusses Caryl Phillips’ novel, A Distant Shore (2004), in the light of recent work by John McLeod and Bill Ashcroft’s notion of the transnation to describe a revised sense of the British nation within which new resemblances gesture towards the potential for a post-racial society. These ideas will be applied to Phillips’ sense of himself as occupying an ontological mid-Atlantic location in relation to recurring images and concerns to be found in his collected essays in A New World Order (2001) and Colour Me English (2011). The article does not argue that Phillips’ novel depicts the success of a post-racial transformation, but rather, one that shows the individual struggles through which such transformation may be possible.