THREE MORE NOVELS ON BRITISH SLAVE TRADING

Sacred Hunger Barry Unsworth (1992)

Joint winner of the 1992 Booker prize, this sprawling saga of the slave trade has the confrontation of two men at its heart. Erasmus Kemp strives for wealth and position through the traffic in human beings. His cousin Matthew Paris is a physician forced to witness the horrors of the middle passage first-hand. Unsworth provides a sophisticated, moving investigation of greed, power and the terrible relationship of oppressor and oppressed.

A Respectable Trade Philippa Gregory (1995)

Set in Bristol in the 1780s, Philippa Gregory’s cleverly told story recounts an impossible love affair. Frances Cole is the wife of an ambitious small-time slave trader, while Mehuru is a highstatus nobleman in his native Africa, who has been captured and made her husband’s property. Avoiding potential pitfalls of sentimentality, Gregory creates a convincing portrait of a society built on inhumanity, and of two people struggling desperately to escape its chains.

Feeding the Ghosts Fred D’Aguiar (1997)

Inspired by the true story of the Zong, the 18th-century ship from which 131 sick enslaved men, women and children were thrown into the sea, this novel is a haunting tale of the cruelty of the trade in human lives. Mintah, an African woman who survives the atrocity and works to bring its perpetrators to some kind of justice, is a remarkable creation, and D’Aguiar tells her tale in spare but lyrical prose.