"When I was doing research on George Ashby, I felt some empathy. There’s something brave about leaving the world you know. If you can make that empathetic journey, you can show a more complicated picture."

"I’ve always been interested in the epic story of how sugar, slavery and settlement shaped individual lives. I just had to find a way to tell it."

"I kept thinking this book tells a story that Britain does not want to remember."

"With the book, what I didn't want was for my conclusion to be about blame. I wanted it to be about acknowledgement and remembering, because those were the things that came out of it for me. And the fact is, we hold in ourselves so many histories. Normally so much of the narrative around race is to try to make people feel bad, rather than to make them do better. And actually, I'd just prefer them to do better."