The Long Song by Andrea Levy

The Long Song by Andrea Levy

Finalist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize
The New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

In her follow-up to Small Island, 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 Song is 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 Song leaves its reader with a newly burnished appreciation for life, love, and the pursuit of both" (The Boston Globe).

Andrea Levy (1956-2019) was the author of Little Island, which won the Whitbread Award (now the Costa Award), the Orange Prize for Fiction (now the Women's Prize for Fiction), and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. She was born in London, England, to Jamaican parents. Her novel was adapted for television by BBC Masterpiece Classic, which received an International Emmy for best TV movie/miniseries. Andrea's other works include the Man Booker Prize contender The Long Song, which was later adapted for television by the BBC, and Fruit of the Lemon.