Palmares

'A once-in-a-lifetime work of literature, the kind that changes your understanding of the world' - Yara Rodriguez Fowler, Guardian

'Astonishingly rich in character and incident, filled with magic and mystery' - Sunday Times

'Intricate, mesmerizing and endlessly inventive and subversive' - Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

'A story woven with extraordinary complexity, depth and skill' - Robert Jones, Jr, author of The Prophets

From plantation to plantation, Almeyda, a young slave girl, hears whispers, rumours of Palmares, a hidden settlement where fugitive slaves live free. But can this promised land exist? And what price is paid for 'freedom'?

In Palmares, Gayl Jones brings to life a world full of unforgettable characters, reimagining extraordinary historical events and combining them with mythology and magic. The result is a sweeping saga spanning a quarter of a century. Of Gayl Jones, the New Yorker noted, '[Her] great achievement is to reckon with both history and interiority, and to collapse the boundary between them.' Like nothing else before it, Palmares embodies this gift.