Slave to Fortune


Book Description

Slave to Fortune is an award-winning historical novel. Tom Cheke's world is turned upside-down when he is kidnapped and enslaved by Barbary corsairs. Tom carves out a promising, new life only to have it shattered again when he falls into the hands of a knight of the Order of St John and into a turbulent world of ciphers, spies and assassinations.




Slave to Fortune


Book Description

Slave to Fortune is a captivating historical adventure. Tom Cheke's world is turned upside-down when he is kidnapped from his home on the Isle of Wight by Barbary corsairs during an audacious night raid. Sold into slavery in seventeenth-century Algiers, Tom carves out a new and promising life only to have it shattered once more when another twist of fate throws him into the hands of a Scottish knight of the Order of St John and into a turbulent world of ciphers, spies and assassinations. Tom's memoir is a remarkable account of how a boy comes of age, grasping life from the setbacks of fortune. It is a tale of friendship and reconciliation, of intrigue and deceit, in which trust is betrayed and deep-rooted beliefs and values are cast into doubt. In Slave to Fortune, DJ Munro skilfully captures a bygone era of galleons and gunpowder. Pirates and secret agents cross swords with crusading knights as the plot twists from the alleyways of Algiers, through the splendour of Malta and Venice, to maritime Portsmouth and the rustic charms of the Isle of Wight. With echoes of Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped and J. Meade Falkner's Moonfleet, Slave to Fortune is an uplifting, intelligent adventure. Suitable for all ages from teens upwards, it will spark curiosity and keep readers enthralled. Praise for the novel: Absolutely fascinating stuff!! Fantastic... just disappointed it's finished! - Garry, senior energy executive. I really enjoyed reading your book, it was very interesting. It is not usually the genre I would go for but I was pleasantly surprised at how much I got into it... I would recommend it. - Erin, 13. It's great... a good read! - Ryan, Commander, Royal Navy (retired). I loved this book! ...lots of sumptuous images to dine on ...a real page turner...edge of the seat exciting. - Anna, High School English Teacher




Slave to Fortune


Book Description




Amos Fortune, Free Man


Book Description

A Newbery Medal Winner When Amos Fortune was only fifteen years old, he was captured by slave traders and brought to Massachusetts, where he was sold at auction. Although his freedom had been taken, Amos never lost his dinity and courage. For 45 years, Amos worked as a slave and dreamed of freedom. And, at age 60, he finally began to see those dreams come true. "The moving story of a life dedicated to the fight for freedom."—Booklist




Slaves of Fortune


Book Description

The Anglo-Egyptian re-conquest of Sudan - Churchill's 'River War' - has been well chronicled from the British point of view, but we still know little about its front line troops, the Sudanese soldiers of the Egyptian Army. Making use of unpublished primary sources and published material located in the United Kingdom and Sudan, Slaves of Fortune provides an historiographic correction. It argues that nineteenth-century Sudanese slave soldiers were social beings and historical actors, shaping both European and African destinies, just as their own lives were being transformed by imperial forces. -- Jacket.




Good Fortune


Book Description

In the tradition of Copper Sun and Chains, this is the stirring tale of a girl’s journey from Africa to freedom and from youth to womanhood, as recounted in this dazzling debut novel. Ayanna Bahati lives in a small African village when she is brutally kidnapped, along with her brother, and forced onto a slave ship to America. As Ayanna, renamed Anna, rises from the cotton fields to the master’s house, she finds the familial love she’s been yearning for in elderly Mary and Mary’s son Daniel—but she is also faced with more threats to her survival. Risking everything to escape the plantation, Anna manages to make it north and to freedom, eventually settling in the free black community of Hudson, Ohio, and educating herself to become a teacher.




Fortune's Bones


Book Description

Winner of the Coretta Scott King Book Award For young readers comes a poetic commemoration of the life of an 18th-century slave, from a past poet laureate and three-time National Book Award finalist For over 200 years, the Mattatuck Museum in Connecticut has housed a mysterious skeleton. In 1996, community members decided to find out what they could about it. Historians discovered that the bones were those of an enslaved man named Fortune, who was owned by a local doctor. After Fortune’s death, the doctor rendered the bones. Further research revealed that Fortune had married, had fathered four children, and had been baptized later in life. His bones suggest that after a life of arduous labor, he died in 1798 at about the age of 60. The Manumission Requiem is Marilyn Nelson’s poetic commemoration of Fortune’s life. Detailed notes and archival photographs enhance the reader’s appreciation of the poem.




Sacred Hunger


Book Description

Winner of the Booker Prize A historical novel set in the eighteenth century, Sacred Hunger is a stunning, engrossing exploration of power, domination, and greed in the British Empire as it entered fully into the slave trade and spread it throughout its colonies. Barry Unsworth follows the failing fortunes of William Kemp, a merchant pinning his last chance to a slave ship; his son who needs a fortune because he is in love with an upper-class woman; and his nephew who sails on the ship as its doctor because he has lost all he has loved. The voyage meets its demise when disease spreads among the slaves and the captain's drastic response provokes a mutiny. Joining together, the sailors and the slaves set up a secret, utopian society in the wilderness of Florida, only to await the vengeance of the single-minded, young Kemp.




Slaves in the Family


Book Description

Fifteen years after its hardcover debut, the FSG Classics reissue of the celebrated work of narrative nonfiction that won the National Book Award and changed the American conversation about race, with a new preface by the author The Ball family hails from South Carolina—Charleston and thereabouts. Their plantations were among the oldest and longest-standing plantations in the South. Between 1698 and 1865, close to four thousand black people were born into slavery under the Balls or were bought by them. In Slaves in the Family, Edward Ball recounts his efforts to track down and meet the descendants of his family's slaves. Part historical narrative, part oral history, part personal story of investigation and catharsis, Slaves in the Family is, in the words of Pat Conroy, "a work of breathtaking generosity and courage, a magnificent study of the complexity and strangeness and beauty of the word ‘family.'"




Fifty Years in Chains


Book Description

Fifty Years in Chains: Or, the Life of an American Slave (1859) was an abridged and unauthorized reprint of the earlier Slavery in the United States (1836). In the narratives, Ball describes his experiences as a slave, including the uncertainty of slave life and the ways in which the slaves are forced to suffer inhumane conditions. He recounts the qualities of his various masters and the ways in which his fortune depended on their temperament. As slave narrative scholar William L. Andrews has noted, Ball's oft-repeated narrative directly influenced the manner and matter of later fugitive slave.