Blonde Roots Hardcover - 2009 - 1st Edition

by Bernardine Evaristo

A provocative novel that upends the historyof the transatlantic slave trade, reversingand reexamining notions of savagery andcivilization, as it follows a young woman'sjourney to freedom.

Award-winning writer Bernardine Evaristo'snovel Blonde Roots asks: What if the historyof the transatlantic slave trade had beenreversed and Africans had enslaved Europeans?How would that have changed theways that people justified their inhuman behavior?And how would it inform our culturalattitudes and the insidious racism that stilllingers and sometimes festers today?

We see this tragicomic world turned upsidedown through the eyes of Doris, an Englishwomanwho is kidnapped one day whileplaying hide-and-seek with her sisters in thefields near their home. She is subsequentlyenslaved and taken to the New World, aswell as to the imperial center of Great Ambossa.She movingly recounts experiencesof tremendous hardship and dreams of thepeople she's left behind, all while journeyingtoward an escape into freedom.

A poignant and dramatic story grounded inprovocative ideas, Blonde Roots is a genuinelyoriginal, profoundly imaginative novel.