The Closest Possible Union

Joanna Scott’s provocative second novel chronicles the life of the Charles Beauchamp, a slave ship, and its fourteen-year-old captain’s apprentice, Tom. The son of the ship’s owner, Tom must navigate the volatile waters of the boat’s crew: a wrathful captain, a raving preacher, a dangerous messboy, and a shadowy deckhand with hidden cargo of his own. As the Charles Beauchamp makes its fateful journey across the Atlantic, Scott unfurls a hallucinatory saga that rings with a modern immediacy.