Jody Berland

Riveting, disquieting, fascinating story, beautifully told. The novel concerns the growing up of a black boy born into slavery in Barbados who is taken on as an assistant by his owners brother, a naturalist, as they were called at the time. He become absorbed in studying marine animals and producing beautifully drawn illustrations of them. But the story is not naively optimistic: what is his status, what is the nature of his relationship with this man, what does escape or freedom entail, and why is his former owner so determined to seize him and return him to slavery? His journey, never entirely his own, takes him to Virginia, to the Arctic, to Nova Scotia and then England, and finally to Morocco. The descriptions of place and the natural world are exquisitely pleasurable to read, the story gripping and often disturbing, balanced by the violent and tender shadows of class, slavery, racism and trauma.