Book review: Sugar in the Blood, By Andrea Stuart

Andrea Stuart can trace one part of her Barbadian family back to George Ashby, a blacksmith who left England in the 1630s. The semi-documented misery of slavery hides another.

Out of four centuries of assymetrical pasts, she fashions a rich family memoir that also serves as a vivid history of Caribbean slavery, and a moving account of migration.

"Mixed-race on both sides, blending the histories of both oppressor and oppressed", the Ashbys and Stuarts experience on, and under, the skin this "epic movement of people".