Rachelle Taqqu

Languorous prose that circles back on itself repeatedly to evoke the cadences of a spoken story. Its sequencing—looping from present events to past origins to future endings and then back to the present— mimics the style of the Genesis narratives in the Hebrew Bible. And the world it creates is compelling, unforgettable. As the book unfolds you begin to understand in your bones how debased and corrupting the institution of slavery was, still is. For its contemporaries, it constituted the entirety of the known world. Illuminating and chilling.