Featured Author Event: Esi Edugyan (Brooklyn)
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Join our author Esi Edugyan for a discussion of her new Knopf novel, WASHINGTON BLACK, on Wednesday, September 19 at Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. Esi will be in conversation with Knopf Senior Editor Diana Miller. The event, which begins at 7:30 p.m., will be followed by a wine reception to celebrate the book’s launch.
Longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, WASHINGTON BLACK is about a boy who rises from the ashes of slavery to become a free man of the world. George Washington Black, or “Wash,” an eleven-year-old field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is terrified to be chosen by his master’s brother as his manservant. To his surprise, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning–and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human. From the blistering cane fields of the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, from the earliest aquariums of London to the eerie deserts of Morocco, WASHINGTON BLACK tells a story of self-invention and betrayal, of love and redemption, of a world destroyed and made whole again, and asks the question: What is true freedom?
Esi Edugyan is also the author of the novels The Second Life of Samuel Tyne and Half-Blood Blues, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Orange Prize. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.