Kate McCafferty's searing first novel explores a little-known episode of seventeenth-century history when colonial England forced thousands of Irish to labor in the sugarcane fields of Barbados. McCafferty delves into this rich historical terrain through the eyes and voice and memory of Cot Daley, kidnapped by the English when she was ten and shipped to the West Indies. Cot's testimony to Peter Coote, the ambitious apothecary sent to discover why Irish servants joined forces with African slaves to rebel against their English masters, takes the form of a rambling narrative, filled with digressions and self-reflections. Still defiant even though she has just been flogged, Cot insists on telling the facts of the uprising her way, and her way turns out to be not so much an unraveling of the plot to rebel as a moving and wide-ranging personal history.The difference between what Peter Coote wants to hear and what Cot Daley wants to say lies at the very heart of the novel. Coote wants to know how and why the rebellion occurred and why Cot joined it. But Cot wants to express the evolution of her emotional life during the many years she has spent on the island. Peter wants facts he can deliver to his own masters to use for their purposes, but Cot wants him to know not just facts but how it feels to be a slave, to have one's child taken away, to suffer the brutality and indignity of being treated like an animal. Thus, Coote gets more than he bargains for, as Cot's story stretches out far beyond his comfort level into areas of human experience he'd rather not hear about. Coote is a doctor and at moments his natural human empathy emerges, allowing him to feel connected to Cot on a deeper level than interrogator to witness. After all, he too feels pressure from above, as those of higher military and aristocratic rank treat him with barely concealed contempt and order him to do their bidding, much in the same way as he issues orders to his servant Lucy and to Cot herself. Like