Washington Black

George Washington Black is eleven years old and enslaved on a Barbados sugar plantation in the 1830s when Christopher "Titch" Wilde, the plantation owner's naturalist brother, chooses him as a personal assistant. Titch teaches Wash to read and soon realizes the boy is a natural artist who can render the natural world with startling precision. A death on the estate forces the two to flee by air, launching Wash into a journey that carries him across the Atlantic and into the Arctic, then on to Nova Scotia, London, and Morocco. Freedom, when it comes, proves complicated. Wash's talent opens doors that his history keeps trying to close, and the men who claim to help him rarely see him whole. Edugyan follows a single life across continents while holding steady on the cost of being brilliant and owned at once.