ABOUT THE BOOK

A Harlot's Progress reinvents William Hogarth's famous prints of 1732 which tell the story of a whore, a Jewish merchant, a magistrate and a quack doctor bound together by sexual and financial greed. Dabydeen's novel endows Hogarth's characters with alternative potential lives, seeing beyond their predicament and redeeming them from their clichéd status as predators or victims.

The protagonist - in Hogarth, a black slave boy, in Dabydeen, London's oldest black inhabitant - is forced to tell his story to the Abolitionists in return for their charity. But he will not embark upon yet another fictional journey into the dark nature of slavery for the voyeuristic delight of the English reader; he refuses to invest in protest or in a parade of grievances.

Instead, the old man ties the reader up in knots as deftly as a harlot her client: he spins a tale of myths, half-truths and fantasies, presenting a dazzling array of lives; a restlessly inventive mind recreating Africa and eighteenth-century London in startlingly poetic ways. What matters to him is the odyssey into poetry, the rich texture of his narrative, not its truthfulness.

In this, his fourth novel, David Dabydeen opens up history to myriad imaginary interpretations, repopulating a vanished world with a strange, defiantly vivid and compassionate humanity.

David Dabydeen was born in Guyana. He read English at Cambridge and presently teaches at the University of Warwick. He has published three books of poems and four novels, which have won many awards, including the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.