Books to read this Summer

WILLIAM WILBERFORCE. William Hague has written the life of William Wilberforce who was both a staunch conservative and a tireless campaigner against the slave trade. He shows how Wilberforce, after his agonising conversion to evangelical Christianity, was able to lead a powerful tide of opinion, as MP for Hull, against the slave trade, a process which was to take up to half a century to be fully realised. Indeed, he succeeded in rallying to his cause the support in the Commons Debates of some the finest orators in Parliament, having become one of the most respected speakers of those times.

Enslaved: The New British Slavery by Rahila Gupta (Author). Slavery in Britain did not end with William Wilberforce at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They may be largely invisible to us but living in our midst are thousands of slaves. Rahila Gupta seeks out five escapees and persuades them to tell us their stories in this compelling book. We meet a pregnant child from Sierra Leone who was locked up in a London house as a domestic slave; a Russian teenager trafficked into prostitution; a Chinese man who lives in fear of the Triads; a religious Somali woman who had to exchange sex for food; and a young Punjabi woman forced into marriage and repeatedly abused by her husband. These are the stories of those who have escaped, through a combination of courage, timing, luck and the humanity of those who helped them. Their testimonies are harrowing but they need to be heard.