The sequel The Quality of Mercy is set in 1767, Kemp has brought the remainder of the crew who are in Newgate Prison and await the trial.

But an Irish fiddler has managed to escape and heads to Durham to tell Billy Blair's mining family of his death in Florida.

Sarah Crown in The Guardian writes "The insurance claim at the heart of the book centres on the question of the value of a slave's life, in pounds, shillings and pence.

At the other end of the scale, the miners keep soul and body together by sending their sons underground at the age of seven for the life-saving sum of sixpence a day."

And concludes the novel "which ought on the surface offer hope and a chance of betterment and freedom for some of its more deserving characters, is so deftly as to leave us in no doubt that, in capitalism's perfectly calibrated machine, the elevation of any one individual will result only in oppression and exploitation of others.