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The Salt Roads

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The Salt Roads

By: Nalo Hopkinson
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
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About this listen

In 1804, shortly before the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue is renamed Haiti, a group of women gather to bury a stillborn baby. Led by a lesbian healer and midwife named Mer, the women's lamentations inadvertently release the dead infant's "unused vitality" to draw Ezili - the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love - into the physical world.

As Ezili explores her newfound powers, she travels across time and space to inhabit the midwife's body - as well as those of Jeanne, a mixed-race dancer and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire living in 1880s Paris, and Meritet, an enslaved Greek-Nubian prostitute in ancient Alexandria.

Bound together by Ezili and "the salt road" of their sweat, blood, and tears, the three women struggle against a hostile world, unaware of the goddess's presence in their lives. Despite her magic, Mer suffers as a slave on a sugar plantation until Ezili plants the seeds of uprising in her mind. Jeanne slowly succumbs to the ravages of age and syphilis when her lover is unable to escape his mother's control. And Meritet, inspired by Ezili, flees her enslavement and makes a pilgrimage to Egypt, where she becomes known as Saint Mary.

©2003 Nalo Hopkinson (P)2018 Tantor African American Fantasy Fiction Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Magic Magical Realism Science Fiction Time Travel World Literature Caribbean Africa
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The Salt Roads is an extraordinary work of historical fiction, imagining the lives of 3 women, Jeanne Duval, best remembered as the mistress of French poet Baudelaire, St Mary of Egypt and Mer a Haitian healer who is an enslaved peer of Mackandal, and the only character entirely created by Hopkinson. With magical realist/spiritual elements and covering decades of the life of Duval, and pivotal moments in the lives of all 3, the Salt Roads is striking, brilliant storytelling.

A Divine Black Feminist Epic

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I don't normally listen or read this genre of book, but it was free and the narrator brought it to life. a wonderful story and well told.

engrossing narrator

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I loved this story and the narration is really special. I enjoyed Midnight Robber but found it hard to follow. Despite having 3 very different strands, this novel was easier. The content about slavery in Haiti (Saint Domingue) was shocking and hard to listen to, but presented well. The different stories interwove really nicely.

Amazing!

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