Queen of Freedom: Defending Jamaica

Description

1720. Blue Mountains, windward Jamaica. In the sweltering heat Captain Shettlewood leads a troop of British soldiers through the thick trees towards the river. They are hunting slaves who have escaped from the brutal plantations. Their mission: to find them, and kill them. But up ahead, hidden among the rocks above the water, a group of men with cutlasses and muskets wait patiently for the instructions of their leader. Queen Nanny is a 'wise woman' with a reputation for ancient obeah magic, and a guerilla fighter with a genius for organisation. So the battle for Jamaica begins, the First Maroon War, in which the maroons - escaped slaves - will make a final, do-or-die stand against the slavers and soldiers of Empire.

Catherine Johnson, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has written many titles for younger readers with a historical setting. Sawbones, a murder mystery set in eighteenth-century London, won the Young Quills Award for Best Historical Fiction 2015. The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo is about a cobbler's daughter from Devon who, in the early nineteenth-century, passed herself off as a Princess from Indonesia. Catherine is half-Jamaican and knows the Blue Mountains well.