Adisa can read. On a Trinidad plantation in the last years of Spanish rule, that alone is dangerous.

Her father is Florian Dottin, a Dutch banker who gambled away his house in Belgium in a single night and fled to a Trinidad estate he had quietly bought through his connections, off the record, against exactly this kind of ruin. He brought his family and his shame with him. Adisa was born into what he built there, and she has no legal status of any kind. Two older enslaved people on Conquerabia taught her letters in secret, and what she learned made her impossible to keep quiet. She speaks when she is meant to stay silent, and she has paid for it more than once. She will pay again.

Around her the island is changing hands. Columbus claimed Trinidad for Spain in 1498 and Spain barely bothered with it after that. Then Ralph Abercromby's fleet appears off the coast, the Spanish governor surrenders overnight, and Britain installs Thomas Picton as its first governor with a free hand and no one to answer to. Picton rules by the gallows and the whip. When he orders the torture of Luisa Calderon, a thirteen-year-old girl, he does not imagine the case will follow him into a London courtroom.

And abolition is coming. Everyone on the island knows what that will mean, and nobody agrees on what comes after.

British readers are taught about Jamaica and Haiti. Trinidad is left out of the account almost entirely. Conquerabia: The Struggle for Identity puts it back, through the eyes of a woman the record was never going to keep.