Free

Martin Mordecai is a Jamaican writer and photographer, now living in Canada. He is the author of the young-adult novel Blue Mountain Trouble and co-author (with Pamela Mordecai) of Culture and Customs of Jamaica.

“In Jamaican parlance, a ‘freeness’ is an act of generosity, freely given. Martin Mordecai’s novel Free, then, is aptly named. . . . It is an astounding act of remembrance, incorporating the diverse races, histories, languages and realities that were creolized to make the Caribbean what it is today . . . a tour de force of historical fiction, a passionate and vital story told by those whose words are so often silenced: the survivors. It is as rich and dark as Caribbean plum cake, as complex in flavours, each ingredient as troubled in provenance, yet in combination a celebration.”—Nalo Hopkinson, author of The Salt Roads“In Free, history comes alive in the hands of a master prose stylist and a meticulous researcher. Martin Mordecai’s brilliant evocation of people, places and events makes us eyewitnesses to Jamaica’s Christmas Rebellion, a daring act of liberation by enslaved African Jamaicans that would hasten the end of chattel slavery in the British colonies. Generations to come will thank Mordecai for enabling us to see with new eyes the people—masters and enslaved—and their shared world of inhumanity that had to be destroyed.”—Olive Senior, author of The Encyclopaedia of Jamaican Heritage