Kai Thomas

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'Fresh and propulsive . . . a testament to the power of story and a veneration of those whose tales are often forgotten' New York Times

'Masterful . . . practically every page turns up a sentence or a phrase that could have been penned by Toni Morrison or James Baldwin' George Elliott Clarke, former Poet Laureate of Toronto

Freedom, you can't get and bury, and keep it and keep it so it won't ever go away. No, child. You got to swing your freedom like a club.

In 1859, deep in the forests of Canada, an elderly woman sits behind bars. She came to Dunmore via the Underground Railroad to escape enslavement, but an American bounty hunter tracked her down. Now she's in jail for killing him, and the fragile peace of Dunmore, a town settled by people fleeing the American south, hangs by a thread.

Lensinda Martin, a smart young reporter, wants to gather the woman's testimony before she can be condemned, but the old woman has no time for confessions. Instead she proposes a barter: a story for a story.

As the women swap stories - of family and first loves, of survival and freedom against all odds - Lensinda must face her past. And it seems the old woman may carry a secret that could shape Lensinda's destiny.

Travelling along the path of the Underground Railroad from the American South to British Canada, from the Indigenous nations around the Great Lakes, to the Black refugee communities of Canada, In the Upper Country is an unforgettable debut about the interwoven history of peoples in North America, slavery and resistance, and two women reckoning with the stories they've been given, and the ones they want to tell.