Europeans For Sale

White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North America's One Million European Slaves

By

Hodder & Stoughton 318pp £18.99 order from our bookshop

GILES MILTON HAS a gift for searching out odd and forgotten corners of history and turning them into best- selling books. Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, which dealt with the spice trade, has sold over half a million copies to date, and it is easy to see his new book doing as well. For this is not a dry history, but a full-blooded narrative closer in style to a historical novel than to an academic study. The chapter headings sound like a run of Technicolor movies from the 1950s: ‘Sultan of Slaves’; ‘Seized at Sea’; ‘Blood Rivals’. One can almost see Virginia Mayo’s bosom heaving.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • 'It would be nice to think that women will achieve equal pay in my lifetime, rather than to watch gloomily as stati… ,
    • In 1660, two of the signatories of King Charles I's death warrant fled across the Atlantic to New England. But were… ,
    • Howard Jacobson's sixteenth novel is 'a love story of sorts, one characterised not by physical desire or even conta… ,
    • 'The sudden immersion in the new and unfamiliar can lead people to write with a rare lack of self-consciousness' P… ,
    • 'Pools bend the rules. Clothes slip off, skin glistens, consciousness heightens. A dreamlike scenario unfolds' Jam… ,
    • 'Although he surely didn’t know W H Auden’s theory that every high C proclaims human freedom and our capacity to tr… ,
    • RT : With beginning tomorrow, we've uncovered a 1997 article from the archive reviewing 'Golf Dream… ,
    Follow Us