Is there a reason you don’t often describe race in characters? when reading Anansi boys I had this weird conception of the characters of Charlie and Spider as white, when on future reads having context it was obvious they should not be.

neil-gaiman:

I actually describe race a lot in Anansi Boys. You know who comes from where, after all, how they talk, what kind of foods they eat. But I only tend to tag the skin colour of the white characters in the book when they first show up.

For example:

 "Excuse me,“ said a small white woman with a clipboard, “are these people with you?”

or

He was a middle-aged white man
with receding very fair hair. If you happened to see Grahame Coats
and immediately found yourself thinking of an albino ferret in an
expensive suit, you would not be the first.

or

They went inside: down wooden
steps to a cellar where rubicund barristers drank side by side with
pallid money market fund managers.

or

Grahame Coats had gone
off-white – one of those colours that turn up in paint catalogues
with names like Parchment or Magnolia. He said, “How did you get
access to those accounts?”

or

Her flatmate, Carol, a
thin-faced white woman from Preston, stuck her head around the
bedroom door. She was towelling her hair vigorously.

or

She wore a white blouse, and a
blue denim skirt, and over it, a grey coat. She had very long legs
and extremely pale skin, and hair which remained, with only minimal
chemical assistance, quite as blonde as it had been when Morris
Livingstone had married her, twenty years earlier.

or

Fat Charlie squeezed in next
to a large woman with a chicken on her lap. Behind them two white
girls chattered about the parties they had attended the previous
night and the shortcomings of the temporary boyfriends they had
accumulated during their holiday.

(Those from a quick flip-through, and far from exhaustive.)

I hope people find on a careful reading that the race of the various characters is pretty obvious, and is often described (for example, Daisy’s father is from Hong Kong, her mother is Ethiopian). 

I’m sorry you read Fat Charlie and Spider and Mr Nancy and their families as white on first read, but that might have something to do with the way that people’s heads reading a book can default all characters to white, if other information is not immediately supplied, which is a very bad habit, and one I hope Anansi Boys might help people to shed.

And there is, after all, a huge pointer to the race of the title characters in the title…

Also, I’d argue that any time it’s the white characters whose race is specified, that’s a pretty strong hint that the main character is a PoC.