Ana Maria Goncalves · 2006 · exile

Ana Maria Goncalves's nine-hundred-page novel, framed as a manuscript found on Itaparica island. Kehinde is taken from Dahomey at eight, enslaved in Bahia, buys her freedom, joins the world of the Male revolt, sails back to Africa, and returns to Brazil at ninety still looking for the son who was sold away from her.

1. 1
   Savalu

   The kingdom of Dahomey, now Benin, and a childhood that ends when King Adandozan's warriors come - Kehinde watches her mother raped and killed and her elder brother sacrificed, and she is eight years old.

2. 2
   Ouidah

   The slaving port, where she is taken with her twin sister and grandmother and held in the barracoons - and then the crossing, on which both of them die, and she arrives on the Bahian coast alone.

3. 3
   Itaparica

   The island in All Saints Bay and a plantation, where she is a house slave and learns to read by sitting in on the owner's daughter's lessons - the accident of literacy that makes the whole manuscript possible.

4. 4
   Salvador

   Bahia, and a slave of gain hired out on the streets - and the Male revolt of 1835, led by Muslim Africans, which Goncalves ties to Luisa Mahin and through her to Kehinde, and to a son born in July 1830.

5. 5
   Rio de Janeiro

   Free, and a businesswoman, and travelling most of Brazil looking for the son who was sold away from her - Omotunde, whose name means the child has returned, and who does not.

6. 6
   Lagos

   She buys her freedom and sails back across the Atlantic to Africa, which almost nobody in her position ever did - and lives there for decades, a Brazilian returnee on the coast she was taken from.

7. 7
   Salvador

   Old and going blind, she takes ship for Brazil one last time to look for her son - and writes the manuscript on the voyage, which is the book, addressed to a boy she has not seen in sixty years.