The Long Song
by Andrea Levy
A formerly enslaved woman tells her story her own way.
you want slavery told by someone who survived it and refuses to be defined by it
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July is an enslaved woman on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the final years before emancipation. She narrates her own story with defiant wit — interrupting herself, arguing with her son who is trying to write her memoir, insisting on her own version of events. Levy uses this formal device to dispatch from inside the experience of enslavement while refusing to let the institution be the only thing that defines her narrator. The most formally inventive slavery narrative on this shelf. July demands to be more than her suffering and the novel honors that demand completely.
WHERE THIS BOOK LIVES
- Setting
- Jamaica • Caribbean
- Voice
- Written by a Jamaican author
- Themes
- After EmpireGenerations
