Angličtina
In 1782 the slave ships sail, as they have for a hundred and sixty years - but the empire that owns them is African, and the cargo is white.**
Elias Hollowell is a Cornish fisherman in an occupied land of permits, rationed bread, and a forbidden faith. He has already buried his wife. When the Adunbi Imperium's raiders come for his parish at first light, he gets his children to the cliff path - and is taken himself: bound, renamed on a clerk's ledger, and carried down into the hold of a ship bound across the ocean the captives call the Black Water.
What he finds in the dark is not only suffering. It is a people. The dead are named one by one so that none are forgotten. A motherless boy needs keeping. An alphabet is taught letter by letter, as a promise - *G for go, the most important word of an alphabet of escape.*
Across fifty-six days and an ocean of the drowned, an ordinary man becomes the one the others can hold onto - carrying his son's small wooden fish, and the single mercy granted to him at the quayside: that somewhere behind him, his children are free.
*History remembers what could have been.*
