In 1668, a young Jamaican girl, Kemosha, secures her freedom from enslavement and finds her true self while sailing to Panama with the legendary Captain Morgan. A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection "Inspired by accounts of women pirates, this fantastical tale represents the era’s cruelty without romanticizing it. Kemosha’s love and persistence combine with forceful action, the terror of harsh racism and passionate, colourful language." —The Toronto Star In 1668, fifteen-year-old Kemosha is sold by a slave owner to a tavern keeper in Port Royal, Jamaica—the “wickedest city on earth.” She soon flees from a brutal assault and finds herself in the company of a mysterious free Black man, Ravenhide, who teaches her the fine art of swordplay, introduces her to her soul mate, Isabella, and helps her win her freedom. Ravenhide is a privateer for the notorious Captain Morgan aboard his infamous ship, the Satisfaction. At Ravenhide’s encouragement, Morgan invites Kemosha to join them on a pillaging voyage to Panama. As her swashbuckling legend grows, she realizes she has the chance to earn enough to buy the freedom of her loved ones—if she can escape with her life . . .
Nominated for the Carnegie Medal for Writing 'A vivid and powerful story ... Another tour de force by Alex Wheatle, a truly gifted storyteller' David Olusoga Kemosha and her brother have lived their whole lives in slavery. Sold away to work in lawless Port Royal, Kemosha takes her chance to escape brutal treatment. With fortune on her side, Kemosha befriends Ravenhide, a man with a mysterious past who teaches her the art of swordfighting, and introduces her to the beautiful runaway Isabella. Yet Kemosha's greatest test yet is upon the deck of the Satisfaction: the notorious Captain Morgan’s ship. His next adventure on the high seas could be the making of Kemosha – and her one chance to earn enough pieces of eight to buy the freedom of her brother...
Moa, a fourteen-year-old slave, gets caught up in the most significant slave rebellion in Jamaican history, paying homage to freedom fighters all over the world. Winner of a 2021 Young Quills Award for Best Historical Fiction “Wheatle brings the struggle of slavery in the Jamaican sugar cane fields to life . . . A refreshing and heartbreaking story that depicts both a real-life uprising against oppression and the innate desire to be free. Highly recommended.” —School Library Journal, Starred Review NOBODY FREE TILL EVERYBODY FREE. Moa is fourteen. The only life he has ever known is toiling on the Frontier sugarcane plantation for endless hot days, fearing the vicious whips of the overseers. Then one night he learns of an uprising, led by the charismatic Tacky. Moa is to be a cane warrior, and fight for the freedom of all the enslaved people in the nearby plantations. But before they can escape, Moa and his friend Keverton must face their first great task: to kill their overseer, Misser Donaldson. Time is ticking as the day of the uprising approaches . . . Irresistible, gripping, and unforgettable, Cane Warriors follows the true story of Tacky’s War in Jamaica, 1760.
"Wheatle has delivered a definitive narrative steeped in cultural philosophy and human sensibilities. Despite the foibles of his tragic characters, a redemptive quality is present--persevering--a testament of the human will to survive against all odds...Highly recommended." --Kaieteur News (Guyana) "With a tough exterior and brash attitude, Naomi is an authentic character in an unfortunate yet accurate picture of modern-day foster care in the UK...The ending is neither predictable nor sugarcoated, leaving readers rooting for this determined heroine." --School Library Journal Included in In the Margins's 2020 Recommended Fiction List Included in Publishers Weekly's African-American Interest Young Readers's Titles, 2019–2020 Included in Booklist's Fall 2019 Youth Preview Included in Publishers Weekly's Fall 2019 Children's Sneak Previews "As politicians might only see the population's day-to-day lives in terms of statistics rather than experiences, (knowing how many people work on minimum wage doesn't say anything about what the experience is like), they might benefit from more of an insight. A useful contemporary novel they should pick up is Alex Wheatle's Home Girl, focusing on the experience of a girl in the foster care system who is constantly shifted around and can never find a permanent home. Wheatle's other books might be just as beneficial, as he draws on his own experiences of Brixton and the social system." --The Boar, included in The Politicians' Required Reading List "Wheatle returns to the world of his award-winning Crongton books with what Atom is calling his most powerful and personal novel yet. Naomi Brisset is a teenage girl growing up too fast in the UK care system. Her journey through a series of foster homes exposes the unsettling, often heartwrenching truth of this life. Yet despite the grit, Wheatle's writing is as rich and warm as ever, bringing courage and hope to an unforgettable heroine's story." --Bookseller (UK), Editors' Choice "Teenager Naomi, old before her time and as vulnerable as she is fierce, is growing up in the care system. Foster homes and pupil referral units revealing the unsettling, often bewildering reality of this existence. Wheatle's empathy, authentic characters, and rich dialogue illuminate the dark." --Observer Magazine (UK) "Another powerful and poignant novel deftly created by one of the most prolific master novelists on either side of the pond. Home Girl is a page-turner, with not a dull moment. Loved it from the rooter to the tooter." --Eric Jerome Dickey, New York Times best-selling author of Before We Were Wicked "Alex Wheatle's latest novel offers no unrealistic fairy tale happy ending. But the award-winning writer, who draws on his own experiences of a childhood in care, does offer some hope for Naomi, a sometimes difficult but very likeable heroine." --Irish News, Children's Book of the Week This isn't my home. Haven't had a proper home since...This is just somewhere I'll be resting my bones for a week and maybe a bit. This time next year you'll forget who I am. I haven't got a diddly where I'll be by then. But I'm used to it. New from the best-selling black British author Alex Wheatle, Home Girl is the story of Naomi, a teenage girl growing up fast in the foster care system. It is a wholly modern story which sheds a much-needed light on what can be an unsettling life--and the consequences that follow when children are treated like pawns on a family chessboard. Home Girl is fast-paced and funny, tender, tragic, and full of courage--just like Naomi. It is Alex Wheatle's most moving and personal novel to date.
For readers of H Is for Hawk, an intimate memoir of belonging and loss and a mesmerizing travelogue through the landscapes and language of Wales Hiraeth is a Welsh word that's famously hard to translate. Literally, it can mean "long field" but generally translates into English, inadequately, as "homesickness." At heart, hiraeth suggests something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time—an acute awareness of the presence of absence. In The Long Field, Pamela Petro braids essential hiraeth stories of Wales with tales from her own life—as an American who found an ancient home in Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a terrible AMTRAK train crash, and as the daughter of a parent with dementia. Through the pull and tangle of these stories and her travels throughout Wales, hiraeth takes on radical new meanings. There is traditional hiraeth of place and home, but also queer hiraeth; and hiraeth triggered by technology, immigration, ecological crises, and our new divisive politics. On this journey, the notion begins to morph from a uniquely Welsh experience to a universal human condition, from deep longing to the creative responses to loss that Petro sees as the genius of Welsh culture. It becomes a tool to understand ourselves in our time. A finalist for the Wales Book of the Year Award and named to the Telegraph's and Financial Times's Top 10 lists for travel writing, The Long Field is an unforgettable exploration of “the hidden contours of the human heart.”
An odyssey-type adventure and coming-of-age story about family obligation and finding one's path. This is The Alchemist meets Inside Out and Back Again for fans of Thanhha Lai. The first middle-grade novel from internationally acclaimed author Tony Mitton!Ryo was born the son of a potter, a fate that he is unsure of once a mysterious wanderer and trained fighter comes to his small village and protects them from a band of thieves. Inspired by the events, Ryo embarks on both a hero's quest and a quest to be a hero. Through his adventures, Ryo trains in the art of both fighting and mindfulness under the elusive Hermit of Cold Mountain. On his journey, he learns the art of stillness, the body's relationship to nature, and the art of controlling one's emotions in order to find his path in life. But when tragedy strikes the group, and the way of life that Ryo knows, he must use what he's learned to do what is right for himself and his future. With excellent pacing and poetic prose, The Potter's Boy is a story about family obligation and finding one's purpose.
Music can carry the stories of history like a message in a bottle. Lord Kitchener, Neneh Cherry, Smiley Culture, Stormzy . . . Groundbreaking musicians whose songs have changed the world. But how? This exhilarating playlist tracks some of the key shifts in modern British history, and explores the emotional impact of 28 songs and the artists who performed them. This book redefines British history, the Empire and postcolonialism, and will invite you to think again about the narratives and key moments in history that you have been taught up to now. Thrilling, urgent, entertaining and thought-provoking, this beautifully illustrated companion to modern black music is a revelation and a delight. 'Engaging and accomplished . . . perfectly judged for young readers.' Guardian
Poppy is young, beautiful and clever – and working as a parlourmaid in the de Vere family's country house. Society, it seems, has already carved out her destiny. But Poppy's life is about to be thrown dramatically off course. The first reason is love – with someone forbidden, who could never, ever marry a girl like her. The second reason is war. As the lists of the dead and wounded grow longer, Poppy must do whatever she can to help the injured soldiers, knowing all the while that her own soldier may never return home . . .
From a fixed point in the middle of English nowhere, Vron Ware takes you through time and space to explain why transcending the urban-rural divide is integral to the future of the planet. Rural England is a mythic space, a complex canvas on which people from many different backgrounds project all kinds of fantasies, prejudices, desires and fears. This book seeks to challenge many of these ideas, showing how the artificial divide between rural and urban works to conceal the underlying relationship between these two fundamental poles of human settlement. This investigation of rurality is oriented from a fixed point in north-west Hampshire, marked by a signpost that points in four directions to two towns, four villages and two hamlets. Through stories, interviews and reportage gathered over two decades, the book demolishes tired notions of rural England that cast it as a separate realm of existence, whether marooned in a perpetual time-warp, or reduced to a refuge for the retired, wealthy urbanites, extreme nature-lovers, and, more recently, anyone tired of waiting out the pandemic in towns and cities. It poses two simple questions: what does the word rural mean today? What will it mean tomorrow? The author is an ambivalent native, held captive to the land by an umbilical cord but always on the verge of fleeing home to the city. She writes from a feminist, postcolonial standpoint that is alert to the slow violence of historical processes taking place over many centuries; enslavement, colonialism, industrialisation, globalisation. Both argument and narrative are propelled by the urgent need to reconsider the concept of ‘countryside’ in the context of the climate emergency and the patent collapse of ecosystems due to intensive farming which has poisoned the land.
From New York Times bestselling author Eric Jerome Dickey, “one of the most successful Black authors of the last quarter-century”* comes a novel about the how one chance meeting can change everything in this thrilling, sexy tale of star-crossed lust. They say the love of money is the root of all evil, but for Ken Swift, it's the love of a woman. Ken is twenty-one, hurting people for cash to try to pay his way through college, when he lays eyes on Jimi Lee, the woman who will change the course of his entire life. What's meant to be a one-night stand with the Harvard-bound beauty turns into an explosion of sexual chemistry that neither can quit. And when Jimi Lee becomes pregnant, their two very different worlds collide in ways they never could have anticipated. Passion, infidelity, and raw emotion combine in Eric Jerome Dickey's poignant, erotic portrait of a relationship: the rise, the fall, and the scars—and desire—that never fade. *The New York Times
