Rebecca Hall

Wake is drawn as much as written. Hugo Martínez illustrated it, and the pages move between eighteenth-century New York and London and a present-day historian riding the subway with a notebook. Rebecca Hall went looking for the women who led revolts aboard slave ships and in colonial cities, and found that the records had been kept by people with every interest in writing down as little as possible. What the book does with that gap is its argument: it reconstructs where it can, marks the silence where it cannot, and says plainly which parts are inference. Hall holds a doctorate in history from the University of California, Santa Cruz, practised law before it, and puts her own family history inside the frame rather than standing outside it. Simon and Schuster published it in 2021.