ABOUT
THE BOOK

When Aminata Diallo sits down to pen the story of her life in London, England, at the dawn of the nineteenth century, she has a world experience behind her. Abducted from her village in West Africa as an eleven-year-old child and forced to walk in a coffle – a string of slaves – for months to the sea, Aminata is put to work on an indigo plantation on the sea islands of South Carolina. She survives by using midwifery skills learned at her mother’s side and by drawing on strength of character inherited from both parents. But Aminata remains trapped, narrowly avoiding the violence that cuts short so many lives around her. Eventually, she has the chance to register her name in the ‘Book of Negroes,’a historic British military ledger allowing 3,000 Black Loyalists passage on ships sailing from Manhattan to Nova Scotia.

This remarkable novel transports the reader from an African village to a plantation in the southern United States, from a soured refuge in Nova Scotia to the coast of Sierra Leone, in a back-to-Africa odyssey of 1,200 former slaves. The Book of Negroes introduces one of the strongest female characters in recent fiction, a woman who cuts a swath through a world hostile to her colour and her sex.