All Souls' Rising
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Madison Smartt Bell |
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| Publisher | Pantheon Books |
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| Haiti in the late eighteenth century: a French colonial society founded on the backs of its black slaves; a morass of shifting political and personal loyalties, of hatred and cruelty meted out to match the increments of lightness and darkness in the color of skin; a world already haunted by its recent genocidal history and facing a new war of extermination in its dangerously near future. This is the setting for Madison Smartt Bell’s All Souls’ Rising—an explosive, epic historical novel. Leaving the dark, contemporary world he has made his own in nine… | |
Haiti in the late eighteenth century: a French colonial society founded on the backs of its black slaves; a morass of shifting political and personal loyalties, of hatred and cruelty meted out to match the increments of lightness and darkness in the color of skin; a world already haunted by its recent genocidal history and facing a new war of extermination in its dangerously near future. This is the setting for Madison Smartt Bell’s All Souls’ Rising—an explosive, epic historical novel.
Leaving the dark, contemporary world he has made his own in nine previous, highly acclaimed novels and short story collections, Bell now turns to the past and brings to life the slave rebellion of the 1790s that would bring an end to the brutal white rule in Haiti. At the epicenter of the rebellion is a second-generation African slave known as Toussaint-Louverture. Self-educated, favored and trusted by his master, quietly charismatic, bold in thought and subtle in action, Toussaint is determined to resist the excesses of the mob and still put an end to French dominion. Toussaint’s story is the focal point of the larger drama of an avaricious inhumanity and the deadly conflagration that was its outcome, the consequences of which have reached even into our own time.
Honors
Reviews
Amazon.com
In his breathtaking and powerful novel that garnered nominations for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, Madison Smartt Bell leaves the dark contemporary world he has so brilliantly made his own in nine previously acclaimed novels and short story collections, such as Save Me, Joe Louis. Now he turns to the past and brings viscerally to life the slave rebellion that would bring an end to the white rule of Haiti in the late eighteenth century. The result is an explosive, epic historical novel of astonishing depth and range, catapulting Bell into the ranks of the finest living authors.
