The Long Song: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

Product Information

Her father, Winston Levy, travelled to Britain on the Empire Windrush in 1948, and was joined six months later by his wife, Amy (nee Ridguard), who had been trained as a schoolteacher in Kingston, Jamaica.

The fable would never be lost and, in its several recitals, might gain a majesty to rival the legends told whilst pointing at the portraits or busts in any fancy great house upon this island of Jamaica. Based on the award-winning novel by the late Andrea Levy ( Small Island), the fictional story is inspired by Levy’s family history.

So I sat with my niece and my husband and we sat and read my great, great grandfather writing to his employer about the slaves on his plantation. Levy has turned her gaze away from British shores and set The Long Song in early 19th-century Jamaica, on a sugar-cane plantation, in the turbulent years before – and just after – the abolition of slavery. As soon as I have wiped its bloody carcass from the page (for it is in a volume that my son was reading), I will continue my tale.

For me, writing has always been a journey of discovery about my past and my family,” she said in a 2015 interview.Levy's fourth novel, Small Island (2004), which looks at the immediate outcomes of World War II and migration on what became known as the Windrush generation, was a critical success. All my books look at what it is to be black and British, trying to make the invisible visible, and to put back into history the people who got left out – people like my dad. She went to art school to study textile design, and there discovered friends who introduced her to books including Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room.