![]() ![]() Along with their friend, the so-called ‘King of Beggars’, Georgie George, these men articulate, in Leila Kumali terms, the entwined ‘strands of “black” and “British” culture’: Buckram has recently been released from jail, William gambles in the dens of Covent Garden. Set in the shadow of the American Revolution, London was, as the blurb to the first edition of the novel puts it: ‘the unlikely refuge for thousands of black Americans who had fought for liberty on the side of the British’. It is the 1780s and both have escaped slavery only to find themselves destitute in London, living lives of comparable cruelty and violence. ![]() Steve Martin’s sustained and serious engagement with black British history is captured in his three works of historical fiction to date, his journalism, and a non-fictional account of the slave trade produced in conjunction with Channel 4.Īt the centre of his debut novel, Incomparable World (1996), are two recent arrivants: Buckram and William. ![]()
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