Title: La isla bajo el mar
First published: 2009
Description: Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue, Zarité -- known as Tété -- is the daughter of an African mother she never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and fear, Tété finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves.

When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770, it’s with powdered wigs in his baggage and dreams of financial success in his mind. But running his father’s plantation, Saint-Lazare, is neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before he brings home a bride -- but marriage, too, proves more difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains dependent on the services of his teenaged slave.

Spanning four decades, Island Beneath the Sea is the moving story of the intertwined lives of Tété and Valmorain, and of one woman’s determination to find love amid loss, to offer humanity though her own has been battered, and to forge her own identity in the cruellest of circumstances.


Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden.
Subjects: Fiction, Colonies, Social conditions, Slaves, Spanish language materials, Sugar plantations, Condiciones sociales, Colonias, Plantation owners, Cultivo, Caña de azúcar, Esclavos, Ficción, Fiction, historical, general, Slaves, fiction, Haiti, fiction, New orleans (la.), fiction, Women slaves, Racially mixed women, Plantation life, Easy reading materials, Play, Friendship, Juvenile fiction, Fiction, historical, Caribbean area, fiction, nyt:hardcover-fiction=2010-05-16, New York Times bestseller, New York Times reviewed, 18.33 Spanish-American literature, Roman historique, Esclavage, Romans, nouvelles, Histoire, Haitians, History, Mujeres mestizas, Novela, Esclavas, Plantaciones de azúcar, Vida en las plantaciones, FICTION, Historical, Literary, Magical Realism, Spanish colonies, Historical fiction, España, Sklaverei, Befreiung
Places: Spain, America, Haiti, Caribbean Area, Saint-Domingue, Amérique, España, América, Dominican Republic, Louisiana
Time periods: 18th century, 18e siècle, Siglo XVIII
LC classification: PQ8098.1.L54 I78 2009