Discover our June Book of the Month: The Long Song by Andrea Levy

As we approach the 75th anniversary of Windrush, we revisit Andrea Levy’s bittersweet novel about the last days of slavery in Jamaica. Plus: explore our reading guide, win the book, and more...

Born to Jamaican parents in London in 1956, Andrea Levy was widely described as a ‘chronicler of the Windrush generation’. As a writer, she made it her mission to chart the experience of Black Britain – the place where she was born yet where she always felt like an ‘outsider’.

Levy’s father had sailed from Jamaica to England on the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948, with her mother following shortly afterwards. ‘Britain made the Caribbean that my parents came from,’ she wrote in an essay in the Guardian. ‘It provided the people – black and white – who make up my ancestry. In return my ancestors, through their forced labour and their enterprise, contributed greatly to the development of this country. My heritage is Britain’s story, too.’

It was this heritage that Levy drew on throughout her literary career, spurred on by a visit to her parent’s homeland after enrolling in a writing course. ‘I realised for the first time that I had a background and an ancestry that was fascinating and worth exploring. Not only that, but I had the means to do it – through writing’.

June 2023 marks the 75th anniversary of Windrush, so there is no better moment to revisit Levy’s work. That’s why her fifth novel, The Long Song, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010, is our Book of the Month for June. 

It’s a bittersweet read in which Levy turned to 1830s Jamaica – documenting the turbulent years of slavery and the early years of freedom that followed. The Long Song is a thrilling journey through that time in the company of people who lived it, and whose voices are absent from the history books. Based on the lives of the people who live and work on the Amity sugar plantation, the narrative centres around July, a slave girl with an indomitable spirit for survival.

Levy published a total of six works in her lifetime, before her death in 2019. Booker Prize judge and broadcaster Margaret Busby said it was her ‘astute eye for British Caribbean life and history, combined with a nuanced playfulness, an unflinching and often irreverent way of seeing, that made her so readable’. Playwright and novelist Bonnie Greer said that ‘what [Levy] described was a people integral to what the UK is. Now and forever. And their bard, Andrea Levy, is immortal.’

You can discover more about The Long Song on our Book of the Month page. Here, you can read an extract from the novel to whet your appetite, and further your reading experience with our detailed reading guide, featuring insights into the novel from critics, and Levy. It also has a series of discussion points for book clubs.

You can also read more from Levy herself, discovering what compelled her to write the novel and how she researched it. In the run-up to Windrush Day on June 22, we’ll be publishing some exclusive essays on the novel, so stay tuned.

We’d love to know what you think of The Long Song – have you read the novel, or are you picking it up for the first time? As always, we’d love you to join us in reading it – or re-reading it – so please share your opinions in the comments or via our social channels. 

Finally, if you’d like to win a copy of the UK edition of The Long Song, published by Tinder Press, along with a limited-edition, money-can’t-buy Booker Prize tote bag, enter our competition via the link below.