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News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

not-for-profit - a workers'co-op - committed to social justice | 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY - 0151 708 7270

The Lamplighter

by Jackie Kay - £9.99  Pan Macmillan (2020)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9781529039856 | ISBN 10: 1529039851

In The Lamplighter award-winning poet and Scottish Makar Jackie Kay takes us on a journey into the dark heart of Britain's legacy in the slave trade.
 
First produced as a play, on the page it reads as a profound and tragic multi-layered poem. We watch as four women and one man tell the story of their lives through slavery, from the fort, to the slave ship, through the middle passage, following life on the plantations, charting the growth of the British city and the industrial revolution.
 
Constance has witnessed the sale of her own child; Mary has been beaten to an inch of her life; Black Harriot has been forced to sell her body; and our lead, the Lamplighter, was sold twice into slavery from the ports in Bristol. Their different voices sing together in a rousing chorus that speaks to the experiences of all those brutalised by slavery, and lifts in the end to a soaring and powerful conclusion.
 
Stirring, impassioned and deeply affecting, The Lamplighter remains as essential today as the day it was first performed. This is an essential work by one of our most beloved writers.

(Price & availability last checked: November 2020)

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Featured book: Recommended Fiction & Poetry for Yuletide 2020!,
In booklists: Black Women, Slavery & the Slave Trade, Play Texts,
In categories: Black, Asian & Other Diasporas, History & Biography, Music & Performing Arts,

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