At a party a couple of years ago, I diffidently introduced myself to a fellow hack who, I knew, was close to my former mother-in-law – or, to be correct, half-stepmother-in-law. ‘Oh,’ she said, not unkindly, once I’d set out the degrees of separation between us. ‘You’re the one with the boring name.’ I won’t deny that it stung a little. But had it sprung from the lips of someone called Tennyson Bouguereau, say, I’d have had to concede the point. The narrator of The Newer World arrives on the page laden with connotations and expectations. His poetical forename is also smoothly assonant with his birthplace, the great state of Tennessee; his Frenchified surname speaks more broadly of the antebellum South, perhaps even of the days before the Louisiana Purchase.

It quickly emerges that, although Tennyson concedes much of his family lore is hearsay, his father was a ‘free Creole’, lynched after robbing a bank in pursuit of a sufficient sum of money to secure his mother’s hand in marriage. The way the sum was negotiated makes it clear that the mother is enslaved by, and possibly related to, the man doing the asking, one Colonel Littlefair, and that Tennyson will be born around 1840, into the same unhappy state.

What follows is part bildungs­roman, part picaresque yarn. Tennyson and his twin, Rosalee, move with their mother to a hardscrabble tobacco plantation bordering on the Littlefair estate, after a slightly larger sum of money than that previously demanded of their father has changed hands. There they work the land and