New Internationalist

The first in the DC Nina Foster series, this fast-paced crime debut by police insider Lisa Cutts takes us to the heart of the Major Incident Room and introduces a gutsy new heroine to the crime scene.

Following a frenzied stabbing, DC Nina Foster is drafted into her first murder investigation. With DCI Stan McGuire as her mentor and John (‘Wingsy’) Wing as her partner, she thrives on the pace and banter that go with the job.

As the body count increases and the force’s biggest-ever manhunt gets underway, Nina is determined to find the murderer. But when the story of her own traumatic childhood comes to light – a past she’s worked hard to hide – her job, her peace of mind and her safety are all in danger.

Lisa Cutts is also the author of Remember, Remember.

The Day I Fell Off My Island tells the story of Erna Mullings, a teenage Jamaican girl uprooted from her island following the sudden death of her beloved grandmother.

When Erna is sent to England to be reunited with her siblings, she dreads leaving behind her elderly grandfather, and the only life she has ever known. A new future unfolds, in a strange country and with a mother she barely knows. The next decade will be a complex journey of estrangement and arrival, new beginnings and the uncovering of long-buried secrets.

A psychologist and former social worker, Yvonne Bailey-Smith, explains:

‘As an immigrant child, I often wished that someone had been able to take me aside and explain to me that leaving everything I knew to go on a so-called adventure to somewhere way beyond my imagination was going cause me an unimaginable sense of loss and sadness. I also wish that the same person had been there to reassure me that I would survive and even flourish, given half a chance. My work and conversations with children, young people and adults, as well as with many friends, have given me a unique insight into the travails of people who have experienced things for which they felt utterly unprepared at the time.’

Lucy Fry’s story opens with the heady and impassioned affair she embarked on during her wife’s pregnancy. It is a relationship that appears to be unstoppable, perhaps even addictive, despite guilt and self-questioning.

With intense and unflinching honesty, she takes her readers on a compelling journey from childhood trauma to addiction then sobriety, infidelity to polyamory and, perhaps most intensely of all, from her fear of being a parent to her exquisite joy at having a son.

L and B’s love for their new baby, ‘The Boy’, changes the dynamic once again. They fumble through early parenthood, in a way that many will recognise, while at the same time trying to fathom and fashion a unique journey of their own.

Alethea Lopez is about to turn 40. Fashionable, feisty and fiercely independent, she manages a boutique in Port of Spain, but behind closed doors she’s covering up bruises from her abusive partner and seeking solace in an affair with her boss. When she witnesses a woman murdered by a jealous lover, the reality of her own future comes a little too close to home.

Bringing us her truth in an arresting, unsparing Trinidadian voice, Alethea unravels memories repressed since childhood and begins to understand the person she has become.

Her next step is to decide the woman she wants to be.

This is an engrossing and atmospheric novel with a strong feminist message at the heart of its page-turning plot. It explores an abusive love-affair with searing honesty, and skilfully tackles the issue of gender violence and racism against the lush and heady backdrop of the national festival, and the music that feeds it. It’s impossible not to root for Alethea – she is an unforgettable heroine, trapped in ways she is only just beginning to understand but shining with strength, resolve and, ultimately, self-determination.

The Day I Fell Off My Island tells the story of Erna Mullings, a teenage Jamaican girl uprooted from her island following the sudden death of her beloved grandmother.

When Erna is sent to England to be reunited with her siblings, she dreads leaving behind her elderly grandfather, and the only life she has ever known. A new future unfolds, in a strange country and with a mother she barely knows. The next decade will be a complex journey of estrangement and arrival, new beginnings and the uncovering of long-buried secrets.

A psychologist and former social worker, Yvonne Bailey-Smith, explains:

‘As an immigrant child, I often wished that someone had been able to take me aside and explain to me that leaving everything I knew to go on a so-called adventure to somewhere way beyond my imagination was going cause me an unimaginable sense of loss and sadness. I also wish that the same person had been there to reassure me that I would survive and even flourish, given half a chance. My work and conversations with children, young people and adults, as well as with many friends, have given me a unique insight into the travails of people who have experienced things for which they felt utterly unprepared at the time.’

Lily Emmett has suffered from selective mutism since childhood and still struggles to see the value of everyday speech. Her sister, Connie, has always spoken for her, and her partner, Richard, has learnt to translate her movements so that they share a unique form of communication.

But when the two sisters return to their childhood home after their mother’s death, the visit inspires memories of the event that first rendered Lily silent, and still haunts them both. The resulting search for the truth about what happened takes them back to a childhood shaped by bullying and familial breakdown and unearths the secrets that lie at the heart of the sisters’ relationship.

Hush is the fantastic debut novel of Sarah Marshall Ball.

The Day I Fell Off My Island tells the story of Erna Mullings, a teenage Jamaican girl uprooted from her island following the sudden death of her beloved grandmother.

When Erna is sent to England to be reunited with her siblings, she dreads leaving behind her elderly grandfather, and the only life she has ever known. A new future unfolds, in a strange country and with a mother she barely knows. The next decade will be a complex journey of estrangement and arrival, new beginnings and the uncovering of long-buried secrets.

A psychologist and former social worker, Yvonne Bailey-Smith, explains:

‘As an immigrant child, I often wished that someone had been able to take me aside and explain to me that leaving everything I knew to go on a so-called adventure to somewhere way beyond my imagination was going cause me an unimaginable sense of loss and sadness. I also wish that the same person had been there to reassure me that I would survive and even flourish, given half a chance. My work and conversations with children, young people and adults, as well as with many friends, have given me a unique insight into the travails of people who have experienced things for which they felt utterly unprepared at the time.’

Dr Michael Lowell – a mild-mannered American, unshakeably decent and at the peak of his profession – is intrigued by Stephen Walsh's invitation to a reunion of Oxford college friends. At least he'll be able to catch up with cynical advertising genius Toby Jenks and frontline medic Hélène Hevré, comparing notes on mid-life frustrations and old ideals. He’ll also have to face Seema Mir, the serene young woman from Karachi who rejected him twenty years ago because he was 'just a little bit too dull’.
He expects a congenial weekend; instead they seed a conspiracy that could rock the foundations of the US government.
Moving between Oxford, New York, Washington, Geneva and Abidjan, this compelling political thriller is the story of five people possessed by an extraordinary idea. Theirs is an 'unthinkable’ plan to save the lives of millions. But the risk is to their own lives is incalculable.

From the winner of the inaugural Myriad First Graphic Novel Competition, here is a darkly funny story of obsession, beautifully crafted in embroidery and lino-cut.

Getting yourself a girlfriend is easy, according to Richard. All you need is papier mache, string, soft material, a balloon, some old fashioned bellows, and a good pair of scissors. The difficult bit is keeping her secret.

Set in an English suburb in the early 1990s, The Black Project by Gareth Brookes is the story of Richard’s all-consuming passion for creating ‘girls’ from household objects. But as his hobby begins to flourish, his real-life friendships and family relationships deteriorate. Richard is an unreliable narrator, and the reader responds to his loneliness and his dogged attempt to find a companion while being horrified by his warped creations. The novel’s focus is on the divide between childhood and adulthood; where sex, perversion, and the grotesque feature in their many forms.

This groundbreaking picture-led celebration of the work of over 100 named British artists, and a few more anonymous ones, reveals a wealth of women’s wit and insight spanning 250 years.

Based on an exhibition of the same name, held at the Cartoon Museum in 2017, this book edited by Nicola Streeten and Cath Tate demonstrates that women have always had a wicked sense of humour and a perceptive view of the world.

For many years, the world of cartoons and comics was seen as a male preserve. The reality is that women have been drawing and publishing cartoons for longer than most people realise. In the early 1760s, Mary Darly illustrated, wrote and published the first book on caricature drawing published in England, A Book of Caricaturas. In the nineteenth century, Britain’s first comic character, Ally Sloper, was developed by the actress and cartoonist Marie Duval (1847–1890). Cartoons were used by the suffragettes, and, during the Great War, artists such as Flora White and Agnes Richardson produced light-hearted propaganda comic postcards.

From the 1920s, a few women cartoonists began to appear regularly in newspapers. The practise was for artists to sign with their surname, so most readers were unaware of the cartoonist’s gender. In 1920, Mary Tourtel created Rupert Bear for the Daily Express, and nearly a hundred years later her character is still going strong. From the 1960s, feminism inspired cartoonists to question the roles assigned to them and address subjects such as patriarchy, equal rights, sexuality and child-rearing, previously unseen in cartoons. Over the last thirty years, women have come increasingly to the fore in comics, zines and particularly graphic novels.

This wide-ranging curation of women’s comics work includes prints, caricatures, joke, editorial and strip cartoons, postcards, comics, zines, graphic novels and digital comics, covering all genres and topics. It addresses the inclusion of art by women of underrepresented backgrounds.

Both the exhibition and book have been made possible by the generosity of Cath Tate Cards.

Compelling, moving and teeming with feral desire: contemporary story of love and redemption set on a remote, windswept Scottish island from the bestselling author of Into the Darkest Corner and The Murder of Harriet Monckton.

Rachel is at crisis point. A series of disastrous decisions has left her with no job, no home, and no faith in herself. But an unexpected job offer takes her to a remote Scottish island, and it feels like a chance to recover and mend her battered self-esteem.

The island’s other inhabitants are less than welcoming. Fraser Sutherland is a taciturn loner who is not happy about sharing his lighthouse – or his precious coffee beans – and Lefty, his unofficial assistant, is a scrawny, scared lad who isn’t supposed to be there at all.

Homesick and out of her depth, Rachel wonders whether she’s made another mistake. But, as spring turns to summer, the wild beauty of the island captivates her soul. For the first time in years, she sees the hope of a better life – if only she can break the deadlock between two men who are at war with one another, and with themselves.

When 11-year-old Indigo and her older brother Robin arrive in South Africa to stay with their father, they find a luxury lifestyle that is a world away from their modest existence back in England. But Indigo is uneasy in the foreign landscape and confused by the family’s silence surrounding her mother’s recent death. Unable to find solace in either new or old faces, she begins to harbour violent suspicions in place of the truth.

Hannah Vincent is also the author of She-Clown, and other stories (Myriad, 2021).

A spellbinding mystery of obsession and guilt by Lesley Thomson, this is also the poignant story of what happens to those left behind when a child vanishes without a trace.

It is the summer of 1968, the day Senator Robert Kennedy is shot. Two nine-year-old girls are playing hide-and-seek in the ruins of a deserted village. Alice has discovered a secret about Eleanor Ramsay’s mother and is taunting the other girl. When it is Eleanor’s turn to hide, Alice disappears.

Years later, an extraordinary turn of events opens up shocking truths for the Ramsay family and all who knew the missing girl.

Much is known about scientists such as Darwin, Newton, and Einstein, but what about lesser-known scientists – people who have not achieved a high level of fame, but who have contributed greatly to human knowledge? What were their lives like? What were their struggles, aims, successes, and failures? How do their discoveries fit into the bigger picture of science as a whole?

Overlooked, sidelined, excluded, discredited: key figures in scientific discovery come and take their bow in an alternative Nobel-prize gallery in a colourful novel by Darryl Cunningham.

Antoine Lavoisier: the father of French chemistry who gave oxygen its name, Lavoisier was a wealthy man who found himself on the wrong side of a revolution and paid the price with his life.

Mary Anning: a poor, working-class woman who made her living fossil-hunting along the beach cliffs of southern England. Anning found herself excluded from the scientific community because of her gender and social class. Wealthy, male, experts took credit for her discoveries.

George Washington Carver: born a slave, Carver become one of the most prominent botanists of his time, as well as a teacher at the Tuskegee Institute. Carver devised over 100 products using one major ingredient – the peanut – including dyes, plastics and gasoline.

Alfred Wegener: a German meteorologist, balloonist, and arctic explorer, his theory of continental drift was derided by other scientists and was only accepted into mainstream thinking after his death. He died in Greenland on an expedition, his body lost in the ice and snow.

Nikola Tesla: a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. A competitor of Edison, Tesla died in poverty despite his intellectual brilliance.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell: a Northern Irish astrophysicist. As a postgraduate student, she discovered the first radio pulsars (supernova remnants) while studying and advised by her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in physics while Bell Burnell was excluded.

Fred Hoyle: an English astronomer noted primarily for the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis – the process whereby most of the elements on the Periodic Table are created. He was also noted for the controversial positions he held on a wide range of scientific issues, often in direct opposition to prevailing theories. This eccentric approach contributed to him being overlooked by the Nobel Prize committee for his stellar nucleosynthesis work.

Any one of these figures could have been awarded a Nobel prize. Not every scientific discoverer was lauded in their time, for reasons of gender, race, or lack of wealth, or (in the case of Lavoisier) being too wealthy: in the 21st century, there are many more reparations and reputations to be made.

Darryl Cunningham is also the author of Supercrash, Science Tales and Billionaires.

 An extract from COMA was shortlisted for the Myriad First Graphic Novel Competition 2018 and longlisted for LDComics Awards 2019.

With echoes of Raymond Carver as well as Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, The Last Pilot re-ignites the thrill and excitement of the space race through the story of one man’s courage in the face of unthinkable loss.

Set against the backdrop of one of the most emotionally charged periods in American history, The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock begins in the bone-dry Mojave Desert during the late 1940s, where US Air Force test pilots are racing to break the sound barrier. Among the exalted few is Jim Harrison: dedicated to his wife, Grace, and their baby daughter.

By the 1960s, the space race is underway and Harrison and his colleagues are offered a place in history as the world’s first astronauts. But when his young family is thrown into crisis, Jim is faced with a decision that will affect the course of the rest of his life—whether to accept his ticket to the moon and at what cost.

Silas and Ethel Woodlock have retired from the business of undertaking to spend their twilight years by the sea but things are not as easy as they’d hoped, and it’s all to do with herring gulls. Stephen Osmer and Lily Lynch are a glamorous young couple on the London literary scene. While Lily pursues an ambitious public art project about ‘cinematic intentions’, we encounter Osmer’s brilliance as an arts journalist, writing a dangerously provocative essay about social justice and the banking crisis, as well as a diatribe about two people called Nicholas Royle, one a novelist, the other a literary critic.

Nicholas Royle’s magnificent novel combines a page-turning story about literary theft, adultery and ambition with a poetic and moving investigation into our relationship to birds and to the environment. It is exquisitely inventive and very funny, juxtaposing the stuff of scandalous gossip with scathing reports of how the world has gone to hell in a handcart. Playfully commenting on the main story are 17 interlinked ‘Hides’. Beautifully illustrated by artist Natalia Gasson, these short texts — primarily about birds, ornithology and films (including Hitchcock’s) — give us a different view of the themes that fly out of the novel: the messy business of being human, the fragility of the physical world we inhabit and the nature of writing itself.

Compelling, audacious and dazzling in its linguistic playfulness and formal invention, An English Guide to Birdwatching explores the fertile hinterland between fact and fiction. In its focus on birds, climate change, the banking crisis, social justice and human migration, it is intensely relevant to wider political concerns; in its mischievous wit and wordplay, and post-modern (or ‘post-fiction’) sensibility, it pushes the boundaries of what a novel might be.

Nicholas Royle is also the author of Quilt.

When Nina returns to work after recovering from a near-fatal injury, she’s supposed to be keeping her head down. But the cold case she’s working on – an infamous train crash from 1964 – is no match for the lure of the shootings, drugs deaths and robberies keeping her colleagues busy.

And before long she uncovers crucial new evidence linking the historic crash to the current spate of heroin-related deaths. Once again, she’s back at the centre of a complex case, which brings her face-to-face with a network of criminals who will stop at nothing to protect their empire.

Brilliantly plotted and fast-paced, Remember, Remember cements Lisa Cutts’ reputation as a crime author of gripping fiction straight from the front line of modern policing.

Lisa Cutts is also the author of Never Forget.

On a hot August day at Vancouver airport, a distraught young man wanders into the Odyssey car rental agency, carrying a backpack full of beer and boxer shorts. Trevor Kelvin is in the midst of a serious crisis – at least in his own mind. His all-too-comfortable existence as a wannabe filmmaker has been disrupted by a single phone call from his Czech girlfriend.

In an attempt to get over her, and get his mojo back, Trevor rents a Dodge Neon and blazes down Highway 99, heading for California, equipped only with a semi-automatic pistol and his trusty plastic visor, and with a flea-ridden cat as his companion. As the drugs and the heartbreak kick in, his journey is increasingly fraught with peril, until the question is no longer whether Trevor will get over his girlfriend's infidelity but whether he'll get out alive.

An odyssey of Homeric proportions, told with a searing clarity reminiscent of Willy Vlautin or Patrick de Witt, The Drive has all the adventure and surrealism of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but overlaid with heartfelt yearning and hope.

Arriving in London, Hayleigh finds work as lap dancer ‘Layla’, intent on earning enough cash to make a fresh start. She has the wit, the looks and skilful moves, exploiting men before they can exploit her. But over the course of a chaotic week, she must make the biggest decision of her life and fight for the one thing she truly wants.

This is a brilliant and moving novel, imaginatively powerful and authentically conceived. Thirty years after the resounding success of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, and written in a similarly intense second-person narrative, Layla speaks for a new generation.

An Orwellian dystopia in the guise of a fast-paced thriller, this is a coolly satirical novel laced with humour, suspense and intrigue.

Welcome to Brighton, a city ruled by a combination of patronage and armed force. After years of civil conflict, gated communities separate government workers from the Scoomers cruising the streets in their battered Fiats. But in a secure area four couples from the town’s elite keep up a tenuous version of middle class life.

They attend each others’ dinner parties and drink and gossip. And then, driving home from a party, Jack and Denise witness a fatal car crash involving one of the Councillors. As the inevitable by-election approaches, they and the people they know are increasingly enmeshed in the town’s political manoeuvring and the violence of the streets outside begins to touch even their lives.

Robert Dickinson is also the author of The Schism.

A unique graphic novel of a small-town community creates a mini-Middlemarch with a Wicker Man twist in a beautifully drawn murder mystery. Blackwood is set in a rural town in middle England where the residents are determined to preserve the status quo – at any cost.

A pair of murders have occurred 65 years apart, uncanny echoes of each other, in the ancient woods beside Blackwood. Evidence and local lore suggest overtones of ritual or of the occult, but despite thorough police investigations, no charges are made. Peg, in her nineties, and her great-grandson, 11-year-old Mason, hold clues to the town’s secrets, but Peg’s dementia dismisses her as unreliable, and no-one wants to listen to a child. Hannah Eaton deftly handles her cast of townspeople with warmth, humour, and humanity, reserving special sympathy for the outsiders – both victims and investigators – who dare to penetrate the community’s closed doors.

Blackwood gradually reveals the dark soul of a town where local politics and the human heart conspire to preserve its way of life at the expense of truth or justice. Blackwood both harks back to days of folklore and is a harbinger of future times in the political landscape we now find ourselves living in.

Hannah Eaton’s second graphic novel follows her much-acclaimed debut, Naming Monsters (2013); an excerpt from it was shortlisted for the 2012 Myriad First Graphic Novel Competition and for the Graphic Scotland 9th Art Award.

Plucked from obscurity in Glasgow, Rab Dillon is about to become the next great protest singer. Seduced by promises of stardom, carrying only the guitar given to him by the girl who broke his heart, he travels down to London. There he records the debut album that will speak to the dispossessed, the disenfranchised and disheartened.

One year later, he is sleeping rough on the streets of Brighton.

A modern-day ballad set across three cities and two years, The Busker is a richly comic exposé of the music industry, the Occupy movement, homelessness, squatting — and failing to live up to the name you (almost) share with your hero. It is also the story of what survives when the flimsy dreams of fame fall apart.

Liam Murray Bell is also the author of So It Is (Myriad, 2012).

Tom Connolly’s dazzling second novel is a funny, turbulent, and heartfelt study of male relationships, and a glorious love letter to the city of New York.

It is April in Manhattan and the destinies of four very different men are about to collide. Nineteen-year-old Finn has just arrived in the city with his irrepressible and volatile girlfriend, Dilly, determined to even the score with his older brother Jack for abandoning him in the UK in the aftermath of their parent's deaths. Across town, successful gallery owner Leo Emerson is haunted by loneliness, unsettled by the contrast between his life and that of his brother-in-law and oldest friend William, who is enviably contented in his faith and his marriage.

When Finn wanders into Leo’s gallery, a series of unexpected and interconnected events unfold, changing the lives of all four men, for better or worse. Leo and William’s settled existences are overturned by events outside of their control, while Jack and Finn’s complex relationship reaches its long-overdue showdown.

Beautifully orchestrated and richly comic, Men Like Air explores the romance and solitude of cosmopolitan life, the transformative power of art, and the impact we have on one another’s lives—and what happens when the ties that bind us are tested or broken. It is an intense and uplifting story of growth and renewal, mapping the complex workings of the human heart across the streets of New York City.

Tom Connolly is also the author of The Spider Truces (Myriad, 2010).

Part love story, part journey of discovery and part comedy of manners, Sue Eckstein’s captivating novel explores a disparate group of expatriates in West Africa and their complicated ties to the country, its people and to each other.

When new diplomat Daniel Maddison arrives in Bakinabe nothing is quite as it seems or what he imagined it would be. Isabel Redmond is tiring of her husband’s fascination with black women’s breasts; the High Commissioner and his wife, Fenella, are both enjoying illicit affairs; an old English judge is wandering through the scrub following a tribe of Fulani herdsmen; Bob Newpin is about to make a killing in timeshares; and just what Father Seamus is up to is anyone’s guess.

Searching for something beyond the cocktail parties, golf and gossip, Daniel finds himself drawn to people and places outside the experience of his High Commission colleagues – and specifically to a dusty warehouse in the heart of the city where a thin blonde woman is silently measuring out lengths of brightly coloured cloth.

Funny, lyrical and ultimately redemptive, Sue Eckstein’s assured debut about passion, loneliness and being an outsider has a deliciously intricate plot, compelling characters and razor-sharp dialogue.

Sue Eckstein is also the author of Interpreters (Myriad, 2011).

Hannah Vincent’s short stories depict the ordinary and extraordinary lives of women coping with the demands of society, the demands of men, of their fellow women, of their own bodies. At the centre of each story is a woman engaged in an act of self-preservation.

In one story a young woman on the cusp of adulthood tries to express the horror and violence she perceives in the world around her, in another a teenage mother struggles to look after her child in the face of her obsession with the baby’s father. One character experiences the freedom of the workplace while another perceives its constraints. One discovers how far her career has pushed her out to the margins of family life while another contemplates retirement. In the title story a woman catches a whiff of what respect and reciprocal attraction feels like.

Women in these stories are exhilarated to discover the joy and surprise of other women’s company, they make bold sexual choices and go on night-time excursions. As grandmothers they give their grandchildren unsuitable presents.

Kate Evans, celebrated author of the breastfeeding bestseller, The Food of Love, acclaimed cartoonist and mother, turns her attention to the joys and pains of growing a baby.

Evans deftly handles the physical and emotional changes that come with being pregnant, looking at the practicalities of every stage as well as the challenges that may arise. Her no-nonsense, quirky and accessible text is illustrated throughout with detailed artwork to guide the reader through the intricacies of human reproduction, whilst her customary laugh-out-loud cartoons demystify the complexities of pregnancy and birth.

The book includes: a graphic guide to conception; practical help for those trying to conceive; early pregnancy advice; information on abortion rights, miscarriage support, screening and scans, physical preparations for birth and the art of birth.

Henry O’Toole sails to America in 1848 to escape poverty and famine in Ireland, only to find anti-Irish prejudice awaiting him. Determined never to starve again, he changes his surname to Taylor and heads south to the state of Virginia, seeking work as a travelling blacksmith on the prosperous plantations. Sarah is a slave. Torn from her family and sold to Jubilee Plantation, she must navigate the hierarchy of her fellow slaves, the whims of her white masters, and now the attention of the mysterious blacksmith. Fellow slave Maple oversees the big house with bitterness and bile and knows that a white man’s attention spells trouble. Given to her half-sister as a wedding present by their white father, she is set on being reunited with her husband and daughter, at any cost.

This extraordinary debut novel heralds the arrival of an exciting new voice in Black women’s writing. The novel is first-person narration told in alternating viewpoints. Set in 1848-1849 in Ireland, New York and Virginia (primarily Virginia). It is an interracial love story set in pre-Civil War America, and inspired by the true story of Huf’s great-great-grandparents. Along with love and race, it touches on themes of identity, sacrifice, belonging and survival.

Research included contemporary slave narratives (printed to further the abolitionist cause), digitally remastered audio recordings of former slaves, legislation on the question of slavery in the mid-19th century, historical texts on the Irish famine and first-hand accounts of English visitors to Ireland at the time, the writings of Charles Trevelyan (responsible for famine relief under Peel and Russell), historical texts on the antebellum South, and visits to the historically preserved Jubilee Plantation in Virginia on which the novel’s plantation is based.