The Long Song: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

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Tamara Lawrance, Haley Atwell, & More to Star in BBC One's The Long Song". Broadway World. 13 July 2018.

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As a child, Caroline Mortimer takes July away from the plantation fields and her mother, Kitty. She ‘adopts’ her, renaming her Marguerite, and using her as a housemaid. How does the relationship between July and Caroline evolve as the novel progresses? Is Kitty’s life now ‘better’ as a housemaid than as a slave working in the fields? Long song was awarded the Walter Scott prize for historical fiction. It was also shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker prize.

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The Long Song by Andrea Levy | Waterstones

White, Peter. "Hayley Atwell & Tamara Lawrance To Star In David Heyman’s BBC Drama The Long Song". Deadline Hollywood. 12 July 2018.Y por fin puedo decir que me he leído uno de mis eternos pendientes de la vida. Conocí este libro al ver en la televisión su versión en miniserie o película larga hará cosa de unos dos o tres años, y si he tardado tanto en leerlo (aunque lo he tenido en la mano muchas veces para comenzarlo) era precisamente porque quería alejarme un poco de la película, esperando que así el libro pudiera sorprenderme más si se me desdibujaba su argumento aunque fuera un poco . Tengo que deciros que la versión cinematográfica es muy fiel al original (De hecho, creo que es la película que he visto nunca que es más fiel al libro del que bebe) y que merece mucho la pena verla. The white colonialists are, as you might expect, a loathsome lot. I haven’t read enough of the literature of colonial West Indies to know whether they are stereotypical, but they could well be – hypocritical, greedy and with no awareness of the humanity of the people of different race who were their slaves. The Long Song is a historical novel by Andrea Levy published in 2010 that was the recipient of the Walter Scott Prize. It was Levy's fifth and final novel, following the 2004 publication of Small Island. In December 2018, a three-part television adaptation of the same name was broadcast on BBC One; The Long Song was aired on PBS in February 2021.

Long Song: A Novel - Andrea Levy - Google Books The Long Song: A Novel - Andrea Levy - Google Books

After the book was released, research by a family member proved just how personal The Long Song truly was. “It was all done and then my niece found out a lot about our own family history,” Levy explained. “She found out that my great grandfather was born a slave. His mother was a housekeeper on a plantation called Mesopotamia and her mother was a field slave called Minnie. We found out that my great, great-grandfather was from Gainsborough in Britain, his name was William Ridsguard and he was the attorney on the plantation, and he had a child with his house keeper...that child, Richard Ridsguard was my great grandfather.” Slavery is a grim subject indeed, but the wonder of Levy’s writing is that she can confront such things and somehow derive deeply life-affirming entertainment from them. ... Levy’s aim, she says, was to write a book that instilled pride in anyone with slave ancestors and The Long Song, though 'its load may prove to be unsettling', is surely that book. The Long Song I found strangely inept for someone who has written such an accomplished novel as Small Island. If I had read it ‘cold’, without knowing the author’s name, I might have judged it the work of a promising (-ish) first-time novelist with a lot to learn. In her fifth novel, The Long Song (2010), she explores an earlier shared history of slaves (coloured) and slave owners (mostly white) in the sugar plantations of 19th-century Jamaica.It depends on whom you ask, as the term is somewhat slippery, meaning that various authors and literary critics define it differently. William H. Gass coined the term in 1970 in an essay entitled "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction". Commenting on American fiction of the 1960s, Gass pointed out that a new term was needed for the emerging genre of experimental texts that openly broke with the tradition of literary realism still dominant in post-WW II American literature. Metafiction is thus an elastic concept covering a wide range of fictions. Levy admits in her own notes on writing the novel to the anticipated difficulty of writing about slavery "without it turning into a harrowing tale of violence and misery". July arose from that anxiety as the answer to it. As a narrator she is unreliable, one-eyed and sometimes mendacious, which is paradoxically why we trust her version of events above the orthodox white historian's view. She is not overly interested in the historical details (though the author has clever devices to give us just as much as we need) preferring to let the story unfold for us through her experiences and her relationships. She is often self-deluded, succeeds in fooling us too at times, and we love her for it. Small Island introduced Andrea Levy to America and was acclaimed as “a triumph” ( San Francisco Chronicle). It won both the Orange Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and has sold over a million copies worldwide. With The Long Song, Levy once again reinvents the historical novel. Jan 21 news There is a three-part PBS Masterpiece adaptation premiering tonight and going on through 14 Feb. We have 9 read-alikes for The Long Song, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.