Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende

Description

Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarité is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo as she discovers through her fellow slaves.

When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, its with powdered wigs in his baggage and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his fathers plantation, Saint-Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before he brings home a bride   but marriage proves more difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.

Spanning four decades, Island Beneath the Sea is the moving story of the intertwined lives of Tété and Valmorain, and of one woman’s determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been battered, and to forge her own identity in the cruelest of circumstances.