Media Center: 'Sugar in the Blood' by Andrea Stuart

WHO: Andrea Stuart

WHAT: SUGAR IN THE BLOOD:
A Family’s Story of Slavery and Empire

WHEN:
Published by Knopf January 23, 2013

WHERE: A true story set in Barbados from the 17th century to the present

WHY:
IN THE LATE 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas.
. . . . .

“A story both intimate and universal.
Stuart effectively demonstrates how the organization of this ‘first slave society’ in Barbados defined all aspects of the institution of slavery, setting the model for the rest of the British Americas. She traces over many generations and mixed parentages between master and slaves and shows how this uneasy relationship essentially created the complicated, rich, tragic legacy of the modern Caribbean.” —KIRKUS REVIEWS

“Vivid and powerful.
Stuart brilliantly weaves together threads of family history, political history, social history, and agricultural history into a vivid quilt covering the evolution of sugar and slavery and sugar’s impact on the development of Barbados.” —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Media Resources:
About the book | Author bio | Author Q&A | Download the jacket or the author photo

Publicist for this title:
Kim Thornton | 212-572-2299 | kthornton@randomhouse.com