![]() The changes of 1838 seem at first merely nominal, but then a gentle new overseer, the 26-year-old son of English clergy, arrives on Amity Plantation. ![]() The whites ruthlessly stomp out the “Baptist War” rebellion of 1832-in a harrowing scene, July, cowering beneath her master’s bed alongside the freeman she’s just slept with, witnesses an act of violence-but the end of slavery is nigh, and the institution sputters on for only a few years before abolition. She’s seized from her mother, renamed “Marguerite,” brought into the plantation house and trained to be the housemaid, chief aide and ultimately confidante to her English mistress, Caroline Mortimer, a plump, overwhelmed young widow. July is fathered by a brutish overseer named Tam Dewar and born to a field slave named Kitty. ![]() ![]() The fifth novel by Levy-whose Small Island won Britain’s Orange Prize and was Whitbread Book of the Year-is set in 19th-century Jamaica and covers the last years of slavery and its long, miserable aftermath. ![]()
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