Twelve-year-old Phillip Enright, a white boy, and Timothy, an aged black seaman, survive a torpedo attack while travelling on a freighter in the Caribbean during World War II and are stranded on a coral island. Things go from bad to worse when Phillip loses his sight, but Timothy teaches the boy how to fend for himself. Once Phillip is self-sufficient, a hurricane descends on the island killing Timothy. Told in retrospect from the adult Phillip's point of view, this historical novel, written by European-American Taylor, arguably shows that if only people would see and value each other as individual human beings, there would be no racism.

For fans of Hatchet and Island of the Blue Dolphins comes Theodore Taylor’s classic bestseller and Lewis Carroll Shelf Award winner, The Cay.
   Phillip is excited when the Germans invade the small island of Curaçao. War has always been a game to him, and he’s eager to glimpse it firsthand–until the freighter he and his mother are traveling to the United States on is torpedoed.
   When Phillip comes to, he is on a small raft in the middle of the sea. Besides Stew Cat, his only companion is an old West Indian, Timothy. Phillip remembers his mother’s warning about black people: “They are different, and they live differently.”
    But by the time the castaways arrive on a small island, Phillip’s head injury has made him blind and dependent on Timothy.

“Mr. Taylor has provided an exciting story…The idea that all humanity would benefit from this special form of color blindness permeates the whole book…The result is a story with a high ethical purpose but no sermon.”—New York Times Book Review
 
“A taut tightly compressed story of endurance and revelation…At once barbed and tender, tense and fragile—as Timothy would say, ‘outrageous good.’”—Kirkus Reviews
 
* “Fully realized setting…artful, unobtrusive use of dialect…the representation of a hauntingly deep love, the poignancy of which is rarely achieved in children’s literature.”—School Library Journal, Starred
 
“Starkly dramatic, believable and compelling.”—Saturday Review
 
“A tense and moving experience in reading.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“Eloquently underscores the intrinsic brotherhood of man.”—Booklist
 
"This is one of the best survival stories since Robinson Crusoe."—The Washington Star

· A New York Times Best Book of the Year
· A School Library Journal Best Book of the Year
· A Horn Book Honor Book
· An American Library Association Notable Book
· A Publishers Weekly Children’s Book to Remember
· A Child Study Association’s Pick of Children’s Books of the Year
· Jane Addams Book Award
· Lewis Carroll Shelf Award
· Commonwealth Club of California: Literature Award
· Southern California Council on Literature for Children and Young People Award
· Woodward School Annual Book Award
· Friends of the Library Award, University of California at Irvine