Shearer, E: River Sing Me Home: THE unmissable fiction debut of 2023 - witness one mother's remarkable journey to find her stolen children

Eleanor Shearer is a mixed-race writer and the granddaughter of Windrush generation immigrants. She splits her time between London and Ramsgate so that she never has to go too long without seeing the sea. For her Master's degree in Politics at the University of Oxford, Eleanor studied the legacy of slavery and the case for reparations. Her fieldwork was in St. Lucia and Barbados. The inspiration for River Sing Me Home came to Eleanor after she discovered a tiny footnote in an exhibition she was attending about the Windrush. Mothers in slavery in the British colonies lived in constant fear of their children being sold. When the Slavery Abolition Act came in in the 1830s, it didn't mean freedom, so many mothers went in search of their lost children.

Powerful, moving and redemptive, RIVER SING ME HOME tells of a mother's desperate search to find her stolen children and her freedom.

'A strong and beautiful novel that stares into the face of brutality and the heart of love' JEANETTE WINTERSON

We whisper the names of the ones we love like the words of a song. That was the taste of freedom to us, those names on our lips.

Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy. These are the names of her children. The five who survived, only to be sold to other plantations.

The faces Rachel cannot forget. It's 1834, and the law says her people are now free. But for Rachel freedom means finding her children, even if the truth is more than she can bear.

With fear snapping at her heels, Rachel keeps moving. From sunrise to sunset, through the cane fields of Barbados to the forests of British Guiana and on to Trinidad, to the dangerous river and the open sea. Only once she knows their stories can she rest. Only then can she finally find home.

'Eleanor Shearer is a remarkable writer and brings this story of a mother's courage to the page with compassion, tenderness and pitch-perfect prose' NATASHA LESTER

'Eleanor Shearer bursts onto the literary scene with...an extraordinary odyssey of pain, love, and homecoming... A haunting and powerful debut' KATE QUINN

'An immersive and spellbinding debut reminding us that the human spirit will always reach for freedom' CHERYL A. HEAD