If you liked Andrea Levy's The Long Song...
...here’s another couple of novels that deal with the theme of emancipated slaves, their struggle for identity and equality, and the wider effects of Abolition...
Cambridge by Caryl Phillips
A powerful and haunting novel set in that uneasy time between the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of the slaves. It is the story of Emily Cambridge, a morally-blind, genteel young woman sent from England to visit her father's West Indian plantation, and Cambridge, a devoutly Christian plantation slave, educated by his first master in England and now struggling to maintain his dignity, and whose sense of justice is both profound and self-destructive.
Two worlds, connected by the insult of slavery, are explored: the Caribbean plantation hierarchy in its every shade of prejudice; and England, at a time when the abolition of slavery was official, but London ‘bird and beast shops’ still sold African children like pets. It is a shocking and unforgettable account of inhumanity—of a self-pronounced Christian nation resistant to black religious conversion because all people might suddenly recognise that they were equal under God.
The Longest Memory by Fred D’Aguiar
Set on an eighteenth-century Virginia plantation, this is the tragic story of a rebellious, fiercely intelligent young slave who breaks all the rules and his father, who inadvertently betrays him. The young slave’s love for a white girl, the daughter of his owner; who quenches his forbidden thirst for learning and his painful relationship with his father are unforgettably drawn in this astonishingly lyrical work.
The novel won both the David Higham Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. It was adapted for television and televised by Channel 4.
