Andrea Levy’s bittersweet novel about the last days of slavery in Jamaica is powerful and intimate - and full of mischievous surprise.

The framing is Jamaican printer-publisher Thomas Kinsman’s attempt to persuade centenarian Miss July to tell her story for his book of slave narratives. Her participation is complicated by a reluctance to accept the term “slavery” and caginess about her personal and working lives, the script alert to present questions of who has the right to relate experience and to what purpose such stories are told.Andrea Levy was the author of six books, including Small Island, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction, and the Whitbread Book of the Year.

Kellaway, Kate (7 February 2010). "The Long Song by Andrea Levy". The Observer. London . Retrieved 12 March 2015. But she does permit herself to describe the symbolic funeral that marked the end of slavery on 31 July 1838, only then to admit that she was not actually present. She was still cooped up with her white mistress, Caroline Mortimer, owner of the sugar plantation. This vivid and disturbing version of The Long Song is further compensation for a flow of novels cruelly shortened. Andrea Levy's Small Island – her fourth novel – has had a glorious career: it not only won the Orange prize, but was voted "Best of the Best" novels ever to win that award. It was an adroit, funny, tender book about a Jamaican immigrant couple, their big-hearted white landlady and her bigoted husband in postwar London and it beautifully described the struggle to survive in a new country. A novel such as Small Island is a hard act to follow, but in her new book Levy has moved into top gear.The Long Song is written as a memoir by an elderly Jamaican woman living in early 19th-century Jamaica during the final years of slavery and the transition to freedom that took place thereafter. It tells the tale of a young slave girl, July, who lives at Amity – a sugarcane plantation. She lived through the 1831 Baptist War, and then the beginning of freedom. Her mother, Kitty; the slaves working the plantation land; and the owner of the plantation, the white woman Caroline Mortimer, are other characters in the novel. [1] Themes [ edit ] Slavery is a subject that has inspired some magnificent fiction (think of Toni Morrison's Beloved or Valerie Martin's Property), but I had some misgivings: might it not, in this case, make for over-serious writing, especially for a novelist as comically inclined as Levy? But she dares to write about her subject in an entertaining way without ever trivialising it and The Long Song reads with the sort of ebullient effortlessness that can only be won by hard work. It was the publication of the prize-winning Small Island in 2004 that propelled Andrea Levy to international acclaim. The novel told the story of Jamaican families like her own integrating into post-war Britain and drew directly from the experiences of her parents and their passage to the Mother Country. The success of 'Small Island' held deep personal significance for Andrea.