Washington Black

Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black opens on a Barbados sugar plantation in the 1830s, where George Washington Black is an eleven year old enslaved boy with an unusual talent for drawing. The plantation owner’s brother, an eccentric scientist building an experimental flying machine, takes Wash on as his assistant. The early chapters are intimate and small. Then circumstances explode, and the rest of the novel becomes a globe-spanning journey across the Arctic, London, Morocco, and the open ocean.

Edugyan writes in long, careful sentences. The book is interested in the deep complications of supposedly liberatory white friendship, and how the kindness of one person can never undo the structure they live inside.

The shifts in tone, from Barbados realism to almost Jules Verne adventure, are deliberate. Some readers find them jarring.

Washington Black was a Booker shortlist title for good reason. Edugyan is one of the best Canadian novelists working.