The Long Song A Novel [Paperback]

Finalist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize

The New York Times Book ReviewNotable Book of the Year

In her follow-up toSmallIsland,winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction, Andrea Levy once again reinvents the historical novel. Told in the irresistibly willful and intimate voice of Miss July, with some editorial assistance from her son, Thomas,The Long Songis at once defiant, funny, and shocking. The child of a field slave on the Amity sugar plantation in Jamaica, July lives with her mother until Mrs. Caroline Mortimer, a recently transplanted English widow, decides to move her into the great house and rename her Marguerite. Together they live through the bloody Baptist War and the violent and chaotic end of slavery. An extraordinarily powerful story, The Long Songleaves its reader with a newly burnished appreciation for life, love, and the pursuit of both (The Boston Globe).

This is a terrific book: beautifully written and imagined, and full of surprises . . . A brilliant historical novel. A. N. Wilson,Reader's Digest

InThe Long Song, Andrea Levy explores her Jamaican heritage more completely than ever before. This sensational novel?--her first since the Orange Prize-?winningSmallIsland, recently adapted for the BBC--tells the life story of July, a slave girl living on a sugar plantation in 1830s Jamaica just as emancipation is juddering into action. Levy's handling of slavery is characteristically authentic, resonant and imaginative. She never sermonises. She doesn't need to--the events and characters speak loud and clear for themselves. Holly Kyte,The Telegraph

The Long Songis above all the female version of emancipation, told in vivid, vigorous language in which comedy, contempt and a fierce poetry are at work . . . For all that this is supposed to be the autobiography of a woman with 'little ink,' editelS"