A masterpiece of insight and historical imagination.

Riau, the maroon, Antoine Hebert, the four French generals betting on who might capture Toussaint, the savagery of cunning of Toussaint’s generals, Dessalines and co. the pirate Tocquet, the trysts of the colonists, the endemic racial problems, General Leclerc and Pauline Bonaparte, the reversals of fortune, the confusion and throughout the towering figure of Toussaint L’Ouverture. This is a wonderful achievement and a fitting end to a great trilogy. The story of Haiti, tragic, comic, defiant and sometimes horrific is told with great sensitivity.