Bernardine Evaristo

Imagine if the transatlantic slave trade was reversed. Imagine Africans the masters and Europeans their slaves . . . Now meet young Doris, living in a sleepy English cottage. One day she is kidnapped and put aboard a slave ship bound for the New World. On a strange tropical island, Doris sees the horrors of the sugarcane fields. Slaves are worked to death under the blazing sun. But though she lives in chains, Doris dreams of escape - of returning home to England and those she loves . . .

Londinium, AD 211. Zuleika is a modern girl living in an ancient world. She's a back-alley firecracker, a scruffy Nubian babe with tangled hair and bare feet - and she's just been married off a fat old Roman. Life as a teenage bride is no joke but Zeeks is a born survivor. She knows this city like the back of her hand: its slave girls and drag queens, its shining villas and rotting slums. She knows how to get by. Until one day she catches the eye of the most powerful man on earth, the Roman Emperor, and her trouble really starts... Silver-tongued and merry-eyed, this is a story in song and verse, a joyful mash-up of today and yesterday.

From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, we follow a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope . . .

It's a hot summer afternoon. Tension is in the air. A gang of youths on bikes gathers outside a chip shop. A teenage boy is stabbed and left bleeding on the street. The boy's motherwonders how this could have happened to her son. She is full of questions, but when the answers lie so close to home, are they really what she wants to hear?

MANIFESTO is Bernardine Evaristo's intimate and inspirational, no-holds-barred account of how she did it, refusing to let any barriers stand in her way. She charts her creative rebellion against the mainstream and her life-long commitment to the imaginative exploration of 'untold' stories. And drawing deeply on her own experiences, she offers a vital contribution to current conversations around social issues such as race, class, feminism, sexuality and aging.

Barrington Jedidiah Walker is seventy-four and leads a double life. Born in Antigua, he's lived in Hackney since the sixties. A flamboyant local character, Barrington is a husband, father and grandfather - but he is also secretly the lover of his childhood friend, Morris. When his marriage goes into meltdown, Barrington wants to divorce Carmel and live with Morris, but after a lifetime of fear and deception, will he manage to break away?

Stanley Williams, angst-ridden banker and boffin, wonders whether there's more to life than his daily nine-to-five grind. One night he's dragged to a disco at Piccadilly Circus and there he meets Jessie: artiste, motormouth, ducker and diver. She swoops Stanley out of his soulless life and off on a rollercoaster road trip across Europe, bringing him face to face with a host of forgotten luminaries from the rich mix of black European history and literature.