Come, let them just read it for themselves. And this is a book to be read for its voice, for its song. For a novel about slavery, The Long Song is wonderfully funny, largely due to July’s antic voice. All this he wishes me to pen so the reader can decide if this is a novel they might care to consider. It is adapted from Andrea Levys award-winning novel by Suhayla El-Bushra, and premiered at Chichester Festival Theatre in October 2021, directed by Charlotte. The Long Song is an inspiring, optimistic and beautifully written tale of one spirited womans emancipation. P erhaps, my son suggests, I might write that it is a thrilling journey through that time in the company of people who lived it. But what befalls them all is carefully chronicled upon these pages for you to peruse. My son says I must convey how the story tells also of July’s mama Kitty, of the negroes that worked the plantation land, of Caroline Mortimer the white woman who owned the plantation and many more persons besides – far too many for me to list here. She was there when the Baptist War raged in 1831, and she was present when slavery was declared no more. July is a slave girl who lives upon a sugar plantation named Amity and it is her life that is the subject of this tale.
As your storyteller, I am to convey that this tale is set in Jamaica during the last turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed. Levys previous novel, 'Small Island,' is rightly regarded as a masterpiece, and with 'The Long Song' she has returned to the level of storytelling that earned her the Orange Prize in 2004. My son Thomas, who is publishing this book, tells me, it is customary at this place in a novel to give the reader a little taste of the story that is held within these pages. From the critically acclaimed Andrea Levy, Orange Prize winning author of SMALL ISLAND, comes this breathtaking, hauntingly beautiful, heartbreaking and unputdownable novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and longlisted for the Orange Prize.
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