Conjure Women by Afia AtakoraĪtakora offers a fascinating closeup on the worlds of midwifery and conjure before and after Emancipation. Here are seven other novels about Black folks in the 1800s, and a few words about the unique and astounding ways the authors bring their stories to life.

In my own novel, In the Upper Country, I sought to imbue freshness in the genre through a variety of means, for example, by attending to the neglected history of Black and Indigenous relations of the period. How to tell a story about a Black 19 th-century experience without resorting to uninspired plot choices, tired dialogue, and stereotypical characters?

It is easy, as a writer of fiction, to be too obvious when navigating such a fraught topic. Chamoiseau's exquisitely rendered new novel is an adventure for all time, one that fearlessly portrays the demonic cruelties of the slave trade and its human costs in vivid, sometimes hallucinatory prose.Slavery (and its afterlife) is full of narrative potential: the enslavement of one person by another is perhaps the most fundamental promise of conflict imaginable. We follow them into a lush rain forest where nature is beyond all human control: sinister, yet entrancing and even exhilarating, because the old man's flight to freedom will transform them all in truly astonishing-even otherworldly-ways, as the overwhelming physical presence of the forest reshapes reality and time itself. Now in paperback, Slave Old Man is a gripping, profoundly unsettling story of an elderly enslaved person's daring escape into the wild from a plantation in Martinique, with his enslaver and a fearsome hound on his heels.

The prose is so electrifyingly synesthetic that, on more than one occasion, I found myself stopping to rub my eyes in disbelief.' -Parul Sehgal, The New York Times Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, Patrick Chamoiseau's Slave Old Man was published to accolades in hardcover in a brilliant translation by Linda Coverdale, winning the French-American Foundation Translation Prize and chosen as a Publishers WeeklyBest Book of 2018. Summary: The 'heart-stopping' (The Millions), 'richly layered' (Brooklyn Rail), 'haunting, beautiful' (BuzzFeed) story of an escaped captive and the killer hound that pursues him 'Slave Old Man is a cloudburst of a novel, swift and compressed-but every page pulses, blood-warm.

Slave Old Man by Patrick Chamoiseau