From the critically acclaimed Andrea Levy Orange Prize winning author of SMALL ISLAND comes this breathtaking hauntingly beautiful heartbreaking & unputdownable novel shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize & longlisted for the Orange Prize. You do not know me yet. My son Thomas who is publishing this book tells me it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. As your storyteller I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery & the early years of freedom that followed. July is a slave girl who lives upon a sugar plantation named Amity & it is her life that is the subject of this tale. She was there when the Baptist War raged in 1831 & she was present when slavery was declared no more. My son says I must convey how the story tells also of Julys mama Kitty of the negroes that worked the plantation land of Caroline Mortimer the white woman who owned the plantation & many more persons besides
- far too many for me to list here. But what befalls them all is carefully chronicled upon these pages for you to peruse. Perhaps my son suggests I might write that it is a thrilling journey through that time in the company of people who lived it. All this he wishes me to pen so the reader can decide if this is a novel they might care to consider. Cha I tell my son what fuss-fuss. Come let them just read it for themselves.