A recurrent theme of Small Island, Andrea Levy’s award-winning novel about the Windrush generation, was the respect and loyalty that Jamaicans felt towards Britain, the Mother Country. Reading her long-awaited new outing, a shocking tale of sugar plantation slaves in the run-up to emancipation and afterwards, one is left wondering how on earth this respect was ever instilled in the first place.

Levy’s examination of the Jamaican slavery experience is recounted in spicy dialect by a feisty old woman named July, born a slave on a plantation named Amity in the early nineteenth century, but now, in 1898, living in comfort with her son Thomas, a successful printer, in Kingston.