The Long Song: Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2010: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

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She grew up on a council estate in Highbury, also in north London, and had a typical working-class upbringing.

Yet it is not as big a part of British history as I would like to see, as I’m sure a lot of people would like to see. Andrea Levy is acclaimed as one of the key British black novelists writing today, and this novel - based on her own family history - is the cornerstone of her work.mp_sf_list_2_description: Tamara Lawrance (King Charles III, On Chesil Beach, Kindred) delivers a fierce and unforgettable performance as July. He, to his Christian shame, is besotted with July – a forbidden fruit he can only enjoy regularly by marrying her mistress.

Her son, Thomas, is a printer who learnt his trade in Britain after his mother abandoned him – felicitously – on a minister's doorstep as a baby. That white missus will have you acquainted with all the many tribulations of her life upon a Jamaican sugar plantation before you have barely opened the cover. The novel was selected in 2007 as the text for a mass read event to accompany commemorations of the abolition of slavery. Robert Goodwin is the idealistic young overseer who rides into Amity Plantation with seemingly revolutionary plans to improve the plantation.Levy was determined that it should not be a "misery-fest", but she did want to expose a hidden chapter of colonial history. Roopesh Parekh is Producer and the series will be distributed by NBC Universal International Distribution.