In his best novel since A Harlot's Progress, David Dabydeen returns to the 18th century, this time for a historical adventure through London and the sugar-cane colony of Demerara, British Guyana. Again Dabydeen takes inspiration from the art of Hogarth and its dens of iniquity: we meet slaves, lowly women on the make, lustful overseers and pious Jews. But it is in his master's copy of Johnson's Dictionary that the slave Francis finds the transformative power of words, and his own path to freedom and redemption.