'I could not believe that I had never heard of this book. It felt as important as Anne Frank's diary, only published nearly a hundred years before' - Steve McQueen, director of the Academy Award-winning film of Solomun Northup's powerful memoir
Solomon Northup is a free man, living in New York. Then he is kidnapped and sold into slavery.
Drugged, beaten, given a new name and transported away from his wife and children to a Louisiana cotton plantation, Solomon will die if he reveals his true identity. This is the searing true story of his twelve years as a slave: the endless brutality, daily humiliations and constant fear, but also the small ways in which he and his fellow men try to survive.
Twelve Years a Slave is a unique, unflinching record of slavery from the inside, and the incredible account of one man whose life was ripped from him - and who fought to get it back.
'A moving, vital testament to one of slavery's "many thousands gone" who retained his humanity in the bowels of degradation' - Saturday Review