Middle passage - Charles Johnson

From the beginning of his career, Charles Johnson has been acclaimed for the richness of his imagination, the virtuosity of his style, and the boldness of his ideas. Now in Middle Passage he gives us his finest work to date, a relentlessly suspenseful novel about the sea and the nineteenth-century slave trade.

The year is 1830 and Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave leading a dissolute life in New Orleans, stows away on the first available ship to avoid marriage. Rutherford learns that the vessel is a slave ship bound for Africa, its crew the most palpable gallery of misfits and degenerates in the annals of sea-faring. With no escape possible, Rutherford must undergo a perilous voyage of discovery with little chance of returning home.

Precise in its historical detail, vivid in its characters and scenes, nimble in its interplay of comedy and serious ideas, Middle Passage is one of the most daring and compassionate works of American fiction in recent years.

'Long after we'd stopped believing in the Great American Novel along comes a spellbinding adventure story that may be just that' Chicago Tribune

'Highly readable . . . by turns mimicking historical romance, slave narrative, picaresque tale, parable, and sea yarn, indebted to Swift, Coleridge, Melville and Conrad' Los Angeles Times Book Review

'Heroic, engrossing in the honourable tradition of Billy Budd and Moby Dick, this is fiction that hooks into the mind' Thomas Keneally, New York Times Book Review

'Johnson is one of the most daring and comic writers of this generation' Ishmael Reed

'Charles Johnson has enriched contemporary American fiction as few young writers can' Stanley Crouch, Village Voice

'Philosophy and art are not simply joined here. They are one' Los Angeles Times