NPR reviews Andrea Levy’s new book,
The Long Song.
Andrea Levy’s
Small Island, which won England’s 2004 Orange Prize for Fiction and Whitbread Book of the Year awards, traced the experiences of a Jamaican-born RAF volunteer and his teacher wife as they settled in 1948 London (the PBS series drawn from the novel aired in April). It was based in part upon the lives of Levy’s parents’ generation. Her new book,
The Long Song, is a remarkable and profoundly imagined re-creation of plantation life in the waning days of slavery in 1830s Jamaica.
Levy infuses her new novel with historical references and authentic details. She also has a wicked sense of humor. “It was finished almost as soon as it began,” she writes in her opening lines, describing the act that results in the conception of her narrator July, a bold, engaging and keenly observant mulatto: “Kitty felt such little intrusion from the overseer Tam Dewar’s part that she decided to believe him merely jostling her from behind like any rough, grunting, huffing white man would if they were crushed together in a crowd.”