Andrea Levy

Harvard Book Store is excited to welcome Orange Prize–winning novelist ANDREA LEVY for a reading from her latest book, The Long Song, newly out in paperback.

The Long Song is told in the voice of Miss July, with some editorial assistance from her son, Thomas. The child of a field slave on the Amity sugar plantation, July lives with her mother until Mrs. Caroline Mortimer, a recently transplanted English widow, decides to move her into the great house and rename her “Marguerite.”

Resourceful and mischievous, July soon becomes indispensable to her mistress. Together they live through the bloody Baptist war, followed by the violent and chaotic end of slavery. Taught to read and write so that she can help her mistress run the business, July remains bound to the plantation despite her “freedom.” It is the arrival of a young English overseer, Robert Goodwin, that will dramatically change life in the great house for both July and her mistress. Prompted and provoked by her son’s persistent questioning, July’s resilience and heartbreak are gradually revealed in this story of slavery, revolution, freedom, and love.

"[The Long Song] is a well-researched book that wears its scholarship lightly. All the realities of plantation life are here: the social gulf between domestic slaves and those working in the field; the extreme physical hardship of cane cultivation; the casual brutality of slaves’ lives, whether in field or house, where a slap, a punch or the whistle of a whip were commonplace. By reading this book we come to appreciate the terrible psychological price that slavery exacted on both slave owner and slave. In this world where cultivation and domesticity existed side by side, oppression and intimacy were enmeshed. The two enemies—masters and slaves—lived tightly entwined lives. Levy illustrates this with subtlety in what is an immensely readable and well-paced book." —The Independent (UK)

"Levy’s use of a delightfully fallible narrator is clever and productive.... As a document of the end of slavery, The Long Song proclaims its own incompleteness and partiality; but as a story of suffering, indomitability, and perseverance, it is thoroughly captivating." 
—The Guardian (UK)