HISTORICAL

ELIZABETH BUCHAN

WASHINGTON BLACK by Esi Edugyan (Serpent’s Tail £14.99, 432 pp)

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018, this searing tale begins on a Barbados sugar plantation. ‘there could be no belonging for a creature such as myself . . . a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind,’ says slave Washington Black.

he has been taken under the wing of ‘titch’, the brother of Washington’s cruel owner. inventor and adventurer, titch has seen Washington’s potential and, after an unexplained death in which Washington is implicated, rescues him.

Slavery — its abominations and cruelties — lies at the heart of the novel. Yet it is also about adventure, science, friendship and the inner journey of an individual. i loved it for its daring and originality.

WRECKER by Noel O’Reilly (HQ £12.99, 384 pp)

Debut author Noel o’reilly conjures the spectacle of disintegrating ships and the gruesome business of scavengers picking at corpses washed ashore in this story about smugglers and wreckers in a Cornish fishing village. So far, so daphne du Maurier. however, o’reilly is also exploring the toxic combination of poverty, religious superstition and harsh social hierarchy that governed these 19thcentury communities.

Feisty, defiant Mary Blight saves Gideon Stone, a Methodist minister, from drowning, and brings him home to nurse him — setting in train a vicious whispering campaign against her.