In 1782, the slave ships still sail, as they have for a hundred and sixty years. But the empire that owns them is African, and the cargo is white.

The Adunbi Imperium is the dominant power of the age, and its prosperity is built on the enslavement of Europeans. Its ships come for the fishing villages of Cornwall, and they take everyone.

Elias Hollowell, a fisherman of Trevannock, is seized at his own harbour, stripped of his name, and entered on the manifest of a slave ship called the Iyalode. Chained in the dark, he is carried across the Black Water toward a continent that will not even notice he has arrived.

But the lower deck keeps a discipline the empire cannot break. The enslaved hold the names of their dead, passing them hand to hand: every parish name, every village, every life the manifest tried to erase, so that no one crosses unremembered. Among them, Elias finds a bond second only to blood: crossing-kin.

Told as the recovered testimony of those who survived, Trevannock is the first book of Crossing-Kin: a sweeping, unflinching work of alternate history that turns the transatlantic slave trade inside out, and asks what we choose to carry, and what we refuse to forget.

The transatlantic slave trade happened. Millions died. The rage that history produced, and that so many people still do not understand, is the reason this book exists. Trevannock asks a simple question: what would you feel if it had happened to you?

Book One of five. The series continues with Black Water, Ferran's Reach, Awakening, and Reckoning.

This book contains depictions of slavery and violence, including a scene of violence against a child.

Anthony Adeloye