Across Geography and History: On Esi Edugyan’s ‘Washington Black’

Washington Black is a terrific new narrative about enslavement, but that description fails to do it justice. Canadian writer Esi Edugyan’s third novel, long-listed for the Booker Prize, is a multi-faceted tale that travels across geography and history. In its rich details and finely tuned ear for language, the book creates a virtual world, immersing the reader in antebellum America and Canada as well as in Victorian England.

The novel opens in Barbados, 1830, where Washington Black, an orphaned and enslaved boy, lives in brutality. “I cleared the cane, only my sweat was of value. I was wielding a hoe at the age of two.” Washington, or “Wash,”