The Long Song

Andrea Levy was born in London in 1956, she not only lives and works in the city but has used London as a setting for many of her other prizewinning novels. This book, The Long Song, was short-listed for the Man Booker prize. The setting is an 1830’s plantation in Jamaica during the last years of slavery and the period immediately following emancipation. This is where a field worker's daughter, July, is born and eventually is taken into the plantation house and renamed “Marquerite” by an English widow. The novel is narrated by the character of July herself, now an old woman and looking back upon her eventful life. This hauntingly beautiful book is thoroughly researched and is an intriguing story of a joint black and white past.