In a radical, revolutionary story, M.T. Anderson juxtaposes the struggle for independence and liberty in the American colonies in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War with the paradox of slavery. The novel’s protagonist, a boy named Octavian, lives with his mother in the College of Lucidity, a community of enlightenment where he is surrounded by learned men who teach him Greek and Latin, music and philosophy. He is their student and their star, often called upon to show off his knowledge and musical prowess. His tutors take acute interest in everything Octavian does, even weighing and recording his bodily excretions. To Octavian there is nothing strange about this—it’s the only life he’s ever known. But one day he discovers a sickening truth: he and his mother are slaves. The College owns them, and he is the subject of their bold experiment designed to determine whether Africans have intellectual capabilities equal to those of white men. He pieces together more of the story from his tutors when he confronts them, and from his mother, whose sadness Octavian can only begin to sense. He is still struggling to reconcile his feelings about the community’s terribly misguided but well-intentioned goal of proving Africans are indeed fully human when a new College funder with strong ties to the southern colonies, and a strong interest in the experiment’s failure, steps in. In this first of two volumes, Anderson follows the fate of Octavian from his life of strange and chilling “privilege” to one of servitude, and then soldier and fugitive. The dense, eighteenth-century prose style will be a struggle for some teen readers. But Anderson’s provocative exploration of ideas debated as central to the foundation of our nation when it was new in the context of Octavian’s story makes this novel well worth the challenge, and an outstanding consideration for high school classrooms. (Age 15 and older)

A gothic tale becomes all too shockingly real in this mesmerizing magnum opus by the acclaimed author of FEED.

It sounds like a fairy tale. He is a boy dressed in silks and white wigs and given the finest of classical educations. Raised by a group of rational philosophers known only by numbers, the boy and his mother — a princess in exile from a faraway land — are the only persons in their household assigned names. As the boy's regal mother, Cassiopeia, entertains the house scholars with her beauty and wit, young Octavian begins to question the purpose behind his guardians' fanatical studies. Only after he dares to open a forbidden door does he learn the hideous nature of their experiments — and his own chilling role in them. Set against the disquiet of Revolutionary Boston, M. T. Anderson's extraordinary novel takes place at a time when American Patriots rioted and battled to win liberty while African slaves were entreated to risk their lives for a freedom they would never claim. The first of two parts, this deeply provocative novel reimagines the past as an eerie place that has startling resonance for readers today.