River Sing Me Home

Every once in a while, a book comes along that is so assured and so powerful you can't believe it's a debut novel. River Sing Me Home is just such a book. From the opening pages, I was thrust into Rachel's desperate, dangerous life as a slave on the run in Barbados in the nineteenth century, and I followed her journey to find the children who were taken from her with my heart in my mouth. Eleanor Shearer is a remarkable writer and she brings this story of a mother's courage to the page with compassion, tenderness and pitch-perfect prose -- Natasha Lester, New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Seamstress A strong and beautiful novel that stares into the face of brutality and the heart of love -- Jeanette Winterson Eleanor Shearer bursts onto the literary scene with the story of Rachel, an enslaved woman who has spent her life tied to the brutal fields of a sugar plantation. When the Emancipation Act of 1834 confers a degree of liberty, Rachel finds herself on the run from Barbados to British Guiana to Trinidad, searching for the five surviving sons and daughters sold away from her arms years ago. What follows is an extraordinary odyssey of pain, love, and homecoming, as Rachel searches not only for her children but for her own past, her own independence, and her own soul. RIVER SING ME HOME is a haunting and powerful debut -- Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye River Sing Me Home is an eloquent, and loving, story of a mother's desperate quest to find the five children who have been ripped from her arms by the cruelty of slavery. A runaway, hunted by those who will both punish and snatch her back to servitude, we follow Rachel's determined search from Barbados to Trinidad, through untamed woods, unsafe towns, and unforgiving waters. Eleanor Shearer has written an immersive and spellbinding debut novel reminding us that the human spirit will always reach for freedom -- Cheryl A. Head, author of Time's Undoing and the Charlie Mack Motown Mysteries