MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “A gripping historical narrative exploring both the bounds of slavery and what it means to be truly free.” —Vanity Fair Eleven-year-old George Washington Black—or Wash—a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is initially terrified when he is chosen as the manservant of his master’s brother. To his surprise, however, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning, and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human. But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash’s head, they must abandon everything and flee together. Over the course of their travels, what brings Wash and Christopher together will tear them apart, propelling Wash ever farther across the globe in search of his true self. Spanning the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, London to Morocco, Washington Black is a story of self-invention and betrayal, of love and redemption, and of a world destroyed and made whole again.

Washington Black accomplished a rare feat in NUBClub history -- it got a unanimous thumbs-up from the entire group. Everyone at NUBClub, from the most plot-focused to the most lit snob, liked this novel. What really drew us to the book was the ambivalence of the morality of so many of the characters. Is Titch good or bad? Does all his work fighting slavery make up for the fact that his entire life was possible because of the income his family earned from it? Does his work to help Wash escape forgive his later abandonment of him? Kim made the interesting point that the book is basically a variant of Frankenstein -- the "creation" of a life that questions its creation, the trip to arctic to escape the world, the need of the created to confront the creator -- and that gave us a lens into the book as one where Wash is continually in problematic relationships with father figures. We deeply admired the way that Edugyan did not hide the violence and terror of slavery, but also the way she did not hide how Kit also abused and terrorized Wash. We talked a lot about the contrast between Kit and Titch as a symbol of a distinction between faith and science, and how faith (even embedded in the name of the plantation) offered lies and false hopes, but how science was cool and indifferent to the suffering of those who follow it. Wash's story was very powerful, and a lot was made of how he as much created himself as anyone made him -- his drawing talent came from him alone, and the aquariums were his invention. And yet we still found Wash an unreliable narrator in the best ways -- he has no idea of his own genius, he can't stop himself from destructive decisions, and (as demonstrated with the octopus) he is capable of creating the same callous displacement for others that he suffered himself. There are just so many nice touches in this novel -- the slave hunter's racism and the flawed intellectualism of all the active racists, the fact that Tanna is overlooked for her talents by her father when Wash appears, the way the slaves at the plantation are introduced as characters but then erased from everyone's memory but Wash's as the story goes on. The erasure was perhaps the most important theme of the book for us. From the storm that crashes the balloon to the winters of arctic to the sandstorm that Wash walks into at the end of book, so much of the novel points to how small the characters are and how much they will be forgotten in a cold and uncaring world. Washington Black is a beautifully rich and deep novel, and one that NUBClub recommends unanimously.