Jane Harris’s novels often focus on the disenfranchised: a maid in The Observations, a woman reduced by spinsterhood in the Victorian era in Gillespie and I, and now, a young slave in this third novel. Disenfranchised they may be, but her protagonists don’t lack agency. The narrator of Sugar Money is Lucien, a slave who is barely in his teens and whose voice is startlingly optimistic. In Martinique in 1765, Lucien and his older brother, Emile, are tasked by their French master with returning to Grenada — where they once lived — and smuggling back 42 slaves who are living under the rule of English invaders at a hospital plantation in Fort Royal.
Podcast Recommendations
Whilst we’ve been wanting to escape the news recently, we still want to learn and these gloriously mind-expanding podcasts are just the ticket.
Become a Pub Quiz Champ
If you ever find yourself wondering why people are ticklish, how perfume works and what exactly the Freemasons are, Stuff You Should Know is for you. It explains all the things we assume we know but actually don’t. It might also help you win the pub quiz. Hosted by jovial Americans Charles (Chuck) Bryant and Josh Clark, this is food for the brain and compulsive listening.
Kate Murray-Browne: Buyer Beware
Kate Murray-Browne’s brilliantly suspenseful first novel The Upstairs Room has been described as a ‘property horror story’. Eleanor and Richard, an editor and lawyer respectively, move into a large four-bedroom house in East London with their two small daughters. The house is at the upper limit of what they can afford and Eleanor feels uneasy about it from the start. They take in a lodger, in the form of 27-year-old Zoe, the temp receptionist from Richard’s office, to help pay for the house, but Eleanor soon begins to feel the house is making her ill. She feels it is “rejecting her, like an unwelcome transplant.”
Hari Kunzru: Between the Grooves
It’s Hari Kunzru’s first press trip to London for a few years, this time to discuss his fifth novel, White Tears. It’s that rare beast: a novel of ideas that is also a transfixing thriller. The morning after he arrives from New York, we meet in a room just off the lobby of his hotel to discuss the book. I was interested in why he wanted to write such an overtly political novel, which confronts issues of race and representation head on.
KINGDOM'S REALM: The Mail on Sunday
When retired engineer Ralph Dixon picked up a note that had been pushed through his letterbox asking if he was interested in his home being used in a television drama, he was rightly suspicious. ‘The message and a telephone number were written in pencil and on a page ripped from a reporter’s notebook. I thought it was a wind-up,’ recalls the 71-year-old. Not surprisingly, Ralph and his wife Marilyn, 68, a retired NHS nurse, carried out thorough background checks before agreeing to allow their Grade II listed property, Oakleigh House, in the Norfolk market town of Swaffham, to feature in the ITV drama Kingdom.
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
Kathleen Collins’s (1942–88) short stories, written in the 1960s and 70s, were unpublished in her lifetime. Alice Walker, then an editor at Ms. magazine, wrote Collins a generous rejection note but it took a posthumous screening of Collins’s film Losing Interest last year, organized by her daughter, for her prose to reach an audience.
This first published collection of stories offers an important perspective on themes of racial identity, sexual freedom and erotic fulfilment.