Middle Passage

From the beginning of his career, Charles Johnson has been acclaimed for the richness of his imagination, the virtuosity of his style, and the boldness of his ideas. Now in Middle Passage, he gives us his finest work to date, a relentlessly suspenseful adventure novel about the sea and the nineteenth-century slave trade.

The year is 1830 and at the center of our story is Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave leading a dissolute life in New Orleans. Rutherford finds himself forced into marriage with Isadora Bailey, a proper yet severe Boston schoolteacher, and, to quickly escape both wedlock and his Louisiana debts, he stows away on the first available ship. To his shock and horror, Rutherford learns that the vessel, the Republic, is a slave ship bound for Africa. Its captain is the American soldier of fortune, Ebenezer Falcon, a buccaneer and empire-builder, its crew the most palpable gallery of misfits and degenerates in the annals of sea-faring. The Republic's mission is to transport the last survivors of a nearly legendary tribe, the Allmuseri, from their devastated homeland to the New World. And Rutherford, with no escape possible, must undergo a perilous voyage of discovery—about his fellow sailors, about the mysterious African cargo they transport through the Middle Passage, and, above all, about himself—with only small hope of returning home.

Precise in its historical detail, vivid in its characters and scenes, nimble in its interplay of (surprising) comedy and serious ideas, Middle Passage is one of the most daring and compassionate works of American fiction in recent years.