won the Bath Novel Award and Harper’s Bazaar Big Book Award. It was longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Pick. In 2019, she was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her second book, Double or Nothing (2022), is the first in a trilogy commissioned by the Ian Fleming Estate to expand the world of James Bond. Her latest novel, A Wild & True Relation (2023), was described by Dame Hilary Mantel as “a rarity – a novel as remarkable for the vigour of the storytelling as for its literary ambition. Kim Sherwood is a writer of capacity, potency and sophistication.”
At the Guardian Sherwood tagged ten favorite adventure stories for girls, including:
Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (2018)Read about the other entries on the list.
While much adventure fiction begins with a privileged white man escaping boredom (see John Buchan’s 39 Steps), the genre is at its most powerful when the protagonist is reaching for adventure as the opposite of tyranny. That’s the case in this blistering novel following George Washington Black, born into enslavement on a Barbados plantation run by the English Wilde brothers. Beginning with a hot-air balloon escape, the novel is globe-hopping in the vein of Jules Verne, and shares DNA with Robert Louis Stevenson in its fraught coming-of-age dynamic between a boy and a father-figure. But overlaying these is the terror and brutality of slavery. Edugyan asks what freedom means in a mind and body haunted by trauma.
Washington Black is among Kai Thomas's seven novels about Black characters in the 19th century and Annie Lampman's ten women-authored novels set in remote and forgotten places.
--Marshal Zeringue
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