A Respectable Trade

Bristol in 1787 is booming, a city where power beckons those who dare to take risks. Josiah Cole, a small dockside trader, is prepared to gamble everything to join the big players of the city. But he needs capital and a well-connected wife.

Marriage to Frances Scott is a mutually convenient solution. Trading her social contacts for Josiah's protection, Frances finds her life and fortune dependent on the respectable trade of sugar, rum, and slaves.

Into her new world comes Mehuru, once a priest in the ancient African kingdom of Yoruba, now a slave in England. From opposite ends of the earth, despite the difference in status, Mehuru and Frances confront each other and their need for love and liberty.

In a breakthrough novel that has all the power of Roots and The Thornbirds, Philippa Gregory has created a haunting tale of forbidden love and exhilaration, a rich and poignant story that sets individuals against a society devastated by intolerance and greed.

Bristol in 1787 is booming, a city where power beckons those who dare to take risks. Josiah Cole, a small dockside trader, is prepared to gamble everything to join the big players of the city. But he needs capital and a well-connected wife.

Marriage to Frances Scott is a mutually convenient solution. Trading her social contacts for Josiah's protection, Frances finds her life and fortune dependent on the respectable trade of sugar, rum, and slaves.

Into her new world comes Mehuru, once a priest in the ancient African kingdom of Yoruba, now a slave in England. From opposite ends of the earth, despite the difference in status, Mehuru and Frances confront each other and their need for love and liberty.

Kirkus Reviews

The latest page-turner from Gregory (The Boleyn Inheritance, Dec. 2006, etc.) is a sobering account of the English slave trade, with a bit of romance thrown in. In 1787 Africa, Mehuru, an envoy for his Yoruban king, is traveling the empire to deliver the king's edict: Yorubans will desist in all slave-trading with white slavers. Mehuru is captured by the English and thrown onto a slave ship owned by Josiah Cole, a small Bristol merchant with dreams of advancement. He and his sister Sarah have done all they can with their three modest vessels-they kidnap Africans, trade them for sugar and rum in the West Indies, then sell the goods in England-but since much of the better trade is denied them because of their class, Josiah decides to marry up. He finds Frances Scott, niece to a prominent lord, but herself a penniless orphan. To both, it is an even exchange-Josiah gets connections to circles of business he could never enter, and Frances has a home. It is Josiah and Sarah's new plan that a handful of slaves will be brought back to England where Frances will tutor them in the ways of the gentry, selling them for an enormous profit. Mehuru and ten others are chained in a cellar, where they are half-starved, raped by Josiah's house guest and whipped, while spending afternoons in the parlor learning polite English. Frances and Mehuru eventually fall in love, and Josiah risks ruin in financial schemes dependent on a single ship cruelly over-packed with captured Africans. The success of this tale lies in the author's nuanced portraits: Frances, a product of her class, is refined, ignorant and selfish (even while devoted to Mehuru, she is shocked when he joins radicals dedicated to ceasing thetrade-her livelihood). Cultured Mehuru lives in a state of astonishment that other humans could be so barbaric. And most interestingly, Sarah, proud of her independence and financial partnership with Josiah, is crushed when he forces her to stay cooped up with Frances and become a "lady." A vivid depiction of the trade and the ruined lives left in its wake. Agent: Esther Newberg/ICM

Philippa Gregory has been penning compelling works of dramatic historical fiction since the mid-1980s, breaking out with the bestselling Wideacre trilogy and creating a buzz with The Other Boleyn Girl. As fellow author Peter Ackroyd once said of her, "She writes from instinct, not out of calculation, and it shows."