The best book I've read so far this year. Andrea Levy tells the story of the last years of Jamaican slavery and the first years of manumission with a piercing humor, sometimes gentle and humane and sometimes appropriately less so.

The story is framed by a successful Jamaican printer who encourages his mother, July, to write down the story of her life, largely because she is distracting him by constantly trying to tell it to him. Mostly she tells the story in the third person but periodically the novel returns to the first person, present tense -- the time she is writing it many years later. It begins with July's conception in the rape of her mother by the overseer. And the continuous narrative ends with an event even more cold hearted and brutal.

In between, it tells the story of July, a sly, witty slave who becomes a house slave and, after manumission, continues on as a house servant.

It is hard for me to capture just how compelling, well written, beautifully imagined, funny, and tragic the book is. So you should read it for yourself.