SOLD Slavery in Madagascar

 

SOLD

Rare book. Mint condition. HB. 217pp. $30 including postage anywhere in Australia. 

Published in 1729, Madagascar: or, Robert Drury's Journal, during Fifteen Years Captivity on that Island, describes the adventures of Robert Drury, an English sailor who was shipwrecked off the coast of Madagascar while still a teenager.

After witnessing the massacre of his shipmates, he spent the next fourteen years living as a slave and fighting alongside the islanders in a world of enemy princes and raging civil wars.

Rescued by an English ship at the age of twenty-nine, he returned to London but then made an extraordinary decision. He went back to Madagascar as a slave trader.

Nearly 300 years later, Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist investigating the unique burial customs of Madagascar's Tandroy people, came across Drury's journal, and became hopeful that it would turn out to be a useful historical source, which might assist him with his investigations.

Previously believed to be a hoax written by the novelist Daniel Defoe, the journal could have proved useless to Parker Pearson's research.

However, he headed for Madagascar, with a team of archaeologists and the journal, in order to understand more about the Tandroy people and to attempt to uncover the truth behind Drury's story.

Young adult fiction explores modern "white" slavery

 

Excellent condition. PB. 272pp. $18 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Lakshmi is a thirteen-year-old girl who lives with her family in a small hut on a mountain in Nepal. Though she is desperately poor, her life is full of simple pleasures, like playing hopscotch with her best friend from school, and having her mother brush her hair by the light of an oil lamp. But when the harsh Himalayan monsoons wash away all that remains of the family's crops, Lakshmi's stepfather says she must leave home and take a job to support her family.

He introduces her to a glamorous stranger who tells her she will find her a job as a maid in the city. Glad to be able to help, Lakshmi journeys to India and arrives at "Happiness House" full of hope. But she soon learns the unthinkable truth: she has been sold into prostitution.

An old woman named Mumtaz rules the brothel with cruelty and cunning. She tells Lakshmi that she is trapped there until she can pay off her family's debt, then cheats Lakshmi of her meager earnings so that she can never leave.

Lakshmi's life becomes a nightmare from which she cannot escape. Still, she lives by her mother's words "Simply to endure is to triumph" and gradually, she forms friendships with the other girls that enable her to survive in this terrifying new world. Then the day comes when she must make a decision - will she risk everything for a chance to reclaim her life?

Written in spare and evocative vignettes, this powerful novel renders a world that is as unimaginable as it is real, and a girl who not only survives but triumphs.