Daniel by Adams, Richard
LIMITED EDITION HARDBACK BOXED SET
Powerful new title from the author of Watership Down
A heart-rending exposé of the evils of slavery 200 years after the Abolition Act was passed,
“By what Name are we to call Thee, Master, to worship Thy divinity?” “I AM THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE.” “O Master, those are Thy flames roaring through ransacked villages, Thy foolish mothers bereft, Thy silly, defenceless victims screaming, Thy whips striking home.” “ I AM ULTIMATE EVIL. FALL DOWN BEFORE ME. THERE IS NO CRUELTY GREATER THAN MINE.”
So begins one of the most potent passages in Richard Adam’s new masterpiece. Daniel is a slave, born in 1759 exposed to the miseries of life on a plantation in the U.S. Expelled by his master for killing another slave, he is brought to England by a sodomising fake cleric and finds his way into the care of a respectable family, eventually becoming page to a rich Quaker widow.
Leaving her service when he grows up and seeking to make his fortune, he signs on for a journey with a slave ship. Sickened and disheartened, he meets Thomas Clarkson joins his campaign against slavery and works with Clarkson and Wilberforce speaking out against this ‘abominable practice’.
Daniel is a powerful, spell-binding tale and is well-timed to coincide with next year’s anniversary of the Abolition of Slavery Act. (March 1807) This is an important anniversary because the transatlantic trade in African peoples was so widespread with such far-reaching effects, across Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas that this date still resonates in society today.
Richard Adams is the author of nineteen books, including the best-selling and award-winning Watership Down, his first novel. Several of his later titles were also very successful and Watership Down and Plague Dogs were filmed. Adams is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts. He lives, retired, in Hampshire.
