Scotland, 1766. Sentenced to a life of misery in the brutal coal mines, twenty-one-year-old Mack McAsh hungers for escape. His only ally: the beautiful, highborn Lizzie Hallim, who is trapped in her own kind of hell. Though separated by politics and position, these two restless young people are bound by their passionate search for a place called freedom.
 
From the teeming streets of London to the infernal hold of a slave ship to a sprawling Virginia plantation, Ken Follett’s turbulent, unforgettable novel of liberty and revolution brings together a vivid cast of heroes and villains, lovers and rebels, hypocrites and hell-raisers—all propelled by destiny toward an epic struggle that will change their lives forever. 

“The parents cannot sell what they do not own, namely the freedom of a grown man.”

Not a lot of people talk about slavery in the United Kingdom. In the times of John Wilkes, there’s a Scottish free man – barely free – who first goes to London to find a job only to find out the dock workers were in dire need of a union and then sold as a slave from the gallows to the very people he first fled from in Scotland, now relocated to Virgina in a Tobacco Farm.

They want you to scare those middling people by violence and rioting. That will get people worrying about the need to maintain order, and stop them thinking about freedom of speech.

The only thing keeping him going is Lizzie, who at first was happy to marry to get her family out of debts – only to find herself married to a guy who also had debts and a gambling habit. Things turn sour when she finds out her new husband is also violent and a liar and loves to visit the slave quarters after dark to get some “quality time” with the new slave girls.

Lizzie runs away with McAsh to the wilderness and is chased both by her husband who now wants a child or her death in order to get remarried quickly with someone who can provide him with a child. That’s baby fever all right! It all comes to death blows in the Indian territories and they make some new friends along the way.

Good Parts: McAsh is sexy as hell and he reminded me a lot of some of ye old romance novels my mom used to read. The adventures keep happening and Lizzie and Ash keep finding themselves in the same spots together. Is it fate? Is it coincidence?

Bad Parts: Lizzie. She was friends with McAsh and I can see why she intervened on his behalf to save him from hanging but why she then let him sit in the ship narrow gallows quarters while her husband took his best friend out immediately? Why did she ride away from him when he saw him tracted as a slave to the plantation she shared with her new husband instead of going to him to say hello and maybe unchain him? It’s only when his muscles started appearing again after the starvation he endured on the ship she “promoted” him to house slave with an interest in mind.

I feel she got thirsty and only really paid attention to him when her own husband was caught cheating (poor McAsh was in the FriendZone – or should I say SlaveZone?). I suppose I can pin it down to her being loyal to her husband and only “cracking” when he hit her over the head when she refused her wifely duties. I wish she shot him when he barged through the bedroom door with an axe.