In the Upper Country

Kai Thomas

In the Upper Country
Format
Hardback
Publisher
John Murray Press
Country
United Kingdom
Published
12 January 2023
Pages
352
ISBN
9781529389593

In the Upper Country

Kai Thomas

Freedom, you can’t get and bury, and keep it and keep it so it won’t ever go away.

No, child.

You got to swing your freedom like a club.

In 1859, deep in the forests of Canada, an elderly woman sits behind bars. She came to Dunmore via the Underground Railroad to escape enslavement, but an American bounty hunter tracked her down. Now she’s in jail for killing him, and the fragile peace of Dunmore, a town settled by people fleeing the American south, hangs by a thread.

Lensinda Martin, a smart young reporter, wants to gather the woman’s testimony before she can be condemned, but the old woman has no time for confessions. Instead she proposes a barter: a story for a story.

As the women swap stories - of family and first loves, of survival and freedom against all odds - Lensinda must face her past. And it seems the old woman may carry a secret that could shape Lensinda’s destiny.

Travelling along the path of the Underground Railroad from the American South to British Canada, from the Indigenous nations around the Great Lakes, to the Black refugee communities of Canada, In the Upper Country is an unforgettable debut about the interwoven history of peoples in North America, slavery and resistance, and two women reckoning with the stories they’ve been given, and the ones they want to tell.

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