As I extended my research beyond British merchants to examine slave traders elsewhere in the Atlantic World, I noticed that there has been surprisingly little written on the men who sold Africans arriving aboard the ships in the Americas.

Katie Donington’s examination of the Hibberts, perhaps the largest slave-trading family in the British Americas, is, therefore, a must-read for anyone wanting to know who drove the traffic. By studying the different members of the Hibbert clan on either side of the Atlantic, Donington demonstrates the centrality of women, both free and enslaved, to slaving merchants’ businesses.

She also reveals the paradoxical ways in which familial connections between merchants were crucial to the smooth functioning of the slave trade—a business premised on sundering family ties between enslaved people. 

I adore historical mysteries, particularly those that confront the unsavory realities of racism, sexism, and homophobia in our not-so-distant pasts. This book delves into all of these in such a striking, fully inhabited way.

What I loved most about this book was the immediacy and urgency of its voice, which drew me in from the first page and never let me go. It’s a harrowing story, and the narrative frame gives it a pace that always manages to drive forward while still allowing enough space for the setting to come to life.

I simply love these bracingly contemporary stories of Black Jamaican women who span the gamut from self-absorbed teenagers to Rihanna-inspired celebrities and overtaxed elders. These narratives take place both in JA and the USA and weave together elements of our twenty-first-century Black diaspora. Each of Arthurs’ stories sings in its own way, with exquisitely rendered details and moments of moral clarity. I love that these stories chronicle such a wide variety of Black women’s lives in such depth and detail. 

I love time travel stories. Stories where protagonists swap lives with other people are so much about acculturation and “passing.” Dislocation, confusion, etc. aside, the main issue is to not be found out. In the story, Charlotte is not always herself. Sometimes she’s in a boarding school in the fifties and sometimes she’s back in time at the same boarding school in the First World War. So we’re dealing with a borrowed life here. The life that Charlotte sometimes borrows belongs to Clare. Charlotte has very little in common with Clare. And even less knowledge of how establishments like this worked back in the day. Some quick learning and imitative skills are needed if she is not to be caught. For instance, she has to deduce what others expect and require of her. But she also has to not lose herself in all this pretense. 

When I came to the… show more.

There’s no escaping past actions in this book—from a dying man confessing he assumed the identity of a dead friend and began a new life to the exploits of the Paisley family during colonial-era Jamaica.

I love the way the family stories intertwine, how the book traces the movement of Jamaican people from the Caribbean island to England and America, and the way the ghosts in the family are not just people but also broader things: slavery, colonization, migration, and abandoned families.

Dr. No was the sixth James Bond novel Fleming wrote but it was the first one I was finally able to read in paperback when I was about twelve years old.

It transfixed me. I had never read anything quite like it, transporting a boy trapped in small-town Ontario into a wider world of sophistication, sex, and violence.

I devoured the other Bond adventures as fast as I could get my hands on them. If any books made me hunger for faraway glamorous places, it was the Bond novels.

If you can’t imagine the influence Fleming’s worldly writing had on me, you have only to read one of the Priscilla Tempest mysteries.

Pirates! Historical fiction for young adults and anyone who enjoys a sea story with twists and turns aplenty, this novel begins in Bristol, England in the eighteenth century. Nancy Kingston’s father is a shipowner whose money comes from sugar plantations and enslaved labor in Jamaica. A tragedy makes sixteen-year-old Nancy his heiress; her brothers send her to the West Indies to marry. But life takes a surprising turn; she and the enslaved maid Minerva, escape to become pirates in the Caribbean. If you’re looking for an absorbing, multicultural tale of girls who go in search of adventure and freedom amidst the horrors of plantation life, this is a must-read. According to the author the novel is based on a true story, which makes it even more fascinating. 

The first autobiography published by an Afro-Caribbean (“Creole”) woman, this “adventure story” chronicles the life of Jamaican icon and national heroine, Mary Seacole who, in her own time, rivaled Florence Nightingale as a founder of modern nursing. The “yaller doctress” became known for her devising of successful treatments for cholera, yellow fever, and malaria in Jamaica and, later, Panama, and became internationally renowned after founding her own hospital-hotel at the frontlines of the Crimean War (1853-1856) where she nursed members of the British military. Upon publication, Seacole’s best-selling life-story gained her awards, acclaim, and the respect of the British nation (denied her by Florence Nightingale, by the way). Seacole’s effervescent writing bubbles over with optimism and can-do spirit.

The rhythm and energy of American Desi!!! It is an absolute delight to read this story. The repeated question, “Which is the color of me?” paired with the bright, colorful, fiber illustrations will surely draw anyone into the book. As all these different colors and threads and fibers come together, we celebrate as the little girl celebrates, “All the colors of me!” As the child of Jamaican immigrants, born and raised here in the States, I very much relate to these complicated in-between experiences of living in multiple worlds, having threads that connect with numerous places, and trying to figure out where I fit, where I belong. American Desi is truly a book for our global society.  

Slavery was brutal in eighteenth-century Jamaica, mostly due to how hard enslaved people were worked as sugar workers. That hard work had massive consequences for enslaved women’s fertility. Early abolitionists used the inability of enslaved populations to naturally reproduce as an indictment of the plantation system. Planters, belatedly, tried to institute policies that helped pregnant women but their desire for profit usually overwhelmed their concern for maternal comfort. It meant that enslaved women themselves took the lead in forcing planters and officials to do something to make pregnancy endurable and infant mortality less extreme than before abolitionism began.