The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson

• National Library and Information System Authority (NALIS), Port-of-Spain, Trinidad & Tobago
• Hartford Public Library, USA

Jeanne Duval, the ginger-coloured entertainer, is descended from African slaves and white sailors. It is twilight, and she argues with her lover Charles Baudelaire in his Paris apartment. Ginger is hot in its roots with a beautiful, lush red flower above. And ginger has a bite as she does…
Mer, plantation slave and doctor, has healing hands though her spirit is sickened. She both hungers for and dreads liberation, and longs for the gods to take her home. My wishes can't fly freely. They're rooted to the ground like me, who eats salt.
Thais, a beauty from Alexandria, was sold into slavery and prostitution as a girl. Impelled to seek a glorious revelation, she will travel the long hot roads to Jerusalem. She is dark-skinned, this beauty, and ruddy like copper. No salt-pucker of bitterness in her.
Ezili. Born from hope vibrant and hope destroyed. Born of bitter experience. Born of wishing or better. Born.
Across centuries and civilizations, award-winning writer Nalo Hopkinson fearlessly explores the relationships women have with their lovers, with each other, with their people, and with the divine. As Jeanne struggles with the volatile Baudelaire, as Mer's dedication is tested by revolution, as Thais crosses paths with the eternal, the author interweaves their experiences and braids vivid acts of brutality with passionate unions of spirit and flesh.

Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica and grew up in Guyana, Trinidad and Canada. She has won the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for Emerging Writers. She is the author of Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber and Skin Folk, a collection of short fiction and the editor of Mojo: Conjure Stories. She lives in Toronto, Canada.