Those fond of literary fiction and heavier historical fiction will enjoy this painfully beautiful masterpiece. This incredible novel has really stuck with me through the years and I reflect on frequently. The beginning is a little slow, but is well worth pushing through. Unsworth elegantly uses the story of a 18th century slave ship to show the reader the horrific immorality of how humans can justify any act as long as it is profitable.

This Booker winning novel, set in Liverpool in 1752, is about the slave trade. It is about greed offset by hope.

I was utterly enthralled by this book initially; I was enamored of the language and deeply invested in the story about the people aboard a slave ship in the 1700s.
Alas, at some point after the middle of the book, the author lost me. He skipped ahead in time when I was so invested in the time in which he had put me. The reliance in the later chapters on pidgin English was wearisome and offensive.
The famous abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, was born a slave but his English was grammatically correct and as elegant as it was powerful. The idea that the white men and the Africans could only communicate by all sides using pidgin English was irritating, demeaning and distracting.
I wish the author had done it differently because before that the book had me by the heart.