The Long Song

Andrea Levy's The Long Song, published in 2010, is written as the memoir of an elderly Jamaican woman looking back over her life. July is born on Amity, a prosperous sugar-cane plantation in Jamaica, and grows up enslaved there in the last years before emancipation and the changes that came with it. Her memoir covers the Baptist War of 1831 and 1832 and the abolition of slavery in 1833, and it stays with the people around her: her mother, Kitty; the enslaved men and women who work the cane; and Caroline Mortimer, the white heiress who inherits the estate and becomes the owner of the plantation.

The book is arranged as an account written in old age, so the plantation and the events of the 1830s are described by someone who lived through them as a child and lived long after them, and the reader is given both the world of Amity and the distance between the events and the remembering of them.

The Long Song was Levy's fifth novel and her last, following Small Island in 2004, and it received the Walter Scott Prize. A three-part television version, sharing the book's title, went out on BBC One in December 2018 and on PBS in February 2021.