Jupiter Williams [Paperback]

'Historical fiction at its very best. ...  intelligent, engaging, and exciting.'

(Books for Keeps )

'... provides plenty for readers to think about, the question is raises still pertinent today.'

(Kate Agnew, Guardian )

'exciting and convincing ... Highly recommended.'

(Write Away )

'exciting and tense ... Super stuff'

(Jill Murphy, The Bookbag )

'masterful storytelling with a constant undertone of menace. Well written, it succeeds as a story about a young man who finds himself as much as a story about slavery.'

(Carousel )

'authentic ... gripping historical thriller.'

(Northern Echo )

'... perfect for children ... who are interested in social history and adventure'

(First News )

London 1800. Jupiter is young, black, living at the African Academy in Clapham with other boys from wealthy Sierra Leonean families. His life is a mixture of privilege and dispossession as he copes with the cruelty of his teachers, the rivalries and tensions among his schoolmates, a sense of duty towards his younger brother Robert and guilt over the death of another brother in Africa. Throughout, Jupiter strives to maintain his dignity, his Christian faith and pride in his roots. 

But beyond the relative ease of Clapham lies another London, where poor black communities struggle for survival along the squalid reaches of the Thames. A world where Jupiter's education and background mean nothing and skin colour alone determines fate. Into this world his younger brother Robert vanishes, and Jupiter is obliged to follow ...

S.I. Martin is a writer and historian, founder of the series of narrative London walks entitled '500 Years of Black London'. He also works in education and the media, specialising in Black British history and literature. He is the author of an adult novel Incomparable World, and Britain's Slave Trade for the Channel 4 series of the same name. He is much in demand with English Heritage, National Maritime Museum, Museum of London, Museum in Docklands, Imperial War Museum and British Council Literature wing. Jupiter Williams, and the sequel, Jupiter Amidships, are his first children's books.