The Long Song by Andrea Levy

This book has been short listed for the Man Booker prize, which is an excellent indication of quality, and it is a beautifully told story. For me, it suffered in comparison to Isabel Allende's book, set in Haiti (whereas this book is set in Jamaica), and if you haven't read either of them, I would try reading this one first and hers second to see if that helps.
Ms. Levy is born of Jamaican immigrant parents and has written of the island and it's complicated relationship with Britain before. In “The Long Song,” she, like Allende, focuses on what the final days of slavery in ­early-19th-century Jamaica brings to the people brought to farm the land. Packaged with a preface and an afterword purporting to have been written by Mr. Thomas Kinsman, a well-to-do black printer living in Jamaica in 1898, and occasionally punctuated by editorial suggestions from that long-suffering man, the novel is presented as the memoirs of his octogenarian mother, Miss July, who was born into slavery on a sugar plantation known as Amity.
Miss July’s narrative switches between a third-person past and her first-person present, adroitly contrasting the earthy Jamaican patois spoken by a high-spirited, ambitious young slave with the deadpan Victorian intricacies and more sophisticated historical perspective of her later self. The gift for dialogue is the best part of the writer's story.
She was conceived, Miss July informs us with withering relish, when Amity’s boorish Scottish overseer thrust himself unwanted upon a field slave — a “rude act” that, according to the New World’s perverse color code, gave her higher status than the children of long-established unions between slaves.
“Me be a mulatto, not a negro,” is the proud young woman’s persistent claim, whether she’s fighting for admission to a Friday night assembly in which only “colored” partners are allowed to dance the quadrille or trying to seduce Robert Goodwin, the naïve new overseer of Amity.
After the uprising known as the Baptist War erupts in 1831, leading to the emancipation of Jamaica’s slaves, Miss July becomes the intermediary between Goodwin, now the plantation’s owner, and a freed work force newly empowered to demand wages and days off in which to tend their own crops, bring their cattle to market and look after their own children. “We no longer slaves,” Goodwin is told, “and we work what suits.”
Of course, this agrarian utopia is not to be. His liberal principles quite forgotten, Goodwin hires white thugs to drive the sugar cane workers from their homes, trample their vegetable gardens and massacre their livestock. Her new role does not save her, which is no surprise to the reader.
Although “The Long Song” is packed with historical drama, Levy’s closer concern is with life as it’s actually experienced. Ms. Levy writes with an ironic voice and a sardonic eye about the island's troubling past. Well done.