Powerful, painful, heartbreaking and devastating, The Prophets (Riverrun 2021), the debut novel by Robert Jones Jr, is an intimate portrait of the lives of black slaves on a plantation in the Deep South of America two hundred years ago. At the heart of the story is the romance and friendship of Isaiah and Samuel, two young black men who have known each other since they were children, and who have grown into adolescence and then young adulthood loving only each other, first as firm friends, almost brothers, and then – naturally as breathing – as lovers. They are each other’s everything.

Left to tend to the animals in the barn, they quietly do their work and cause no trouble, receiving mostly kindness from others in the black community who have known them since they were two young orphans. But when one of the black men who considers himself a leader decides to start preaching the word of God, and realises the reality of their relationship, he begins a campaign of mistrust and negativity towards them, wanting the boys to turn away from each other. The owner of the plantation wants them to breed with the black women to produce more slaves. The owner’s only son, Timothy, when he returns occasionally from his studies in the north, wants to satisfy his own desires without his parents’ knowledge. And when betrayal threatens, the refuge in each other that Isaiah and Samuel have always relied upon becomes untenable.

This is a book written in the most exquisite literary language reminiscent of Toni Morrison. Each chapter is from the perspective of a different character, and as the novel progresses, we come to know all of them – both black, white and mixed-race – in intimate and stunning character studies. The many, many ways black people were subjugated, denigrated, humiliated and destroyed by white ‘masters’ at the time are detailed in visceral and raw descriptions that will break your heart over and over again. The forced sex. The ‘breeding’. The lashings, the whippings, the hangings. The backbreaking work of cotton picking. The absurd and unnecessary arbitrary rules. The forced removal of babies and children from their parents. Births of babies who are the result of the rape of their black mother by a white man, and their treatment forever after as black (and damaged), even if they have skin as white and eyes as blue as their master. The banishment of language. The bestowing of new names, with people forbidden to use – or even to know – their real names. The depiction of them not even as people, not even equal to animals, because even animals are fed and watered and sheltered and cared for. The whole machinery of slavery and its horrific consequences are presented in this book in a way that will take away your breath, even if you have read about it before. Even if you think you know, this book will stun you over and over again.

When Samuel and Isaiah’s love comes to be seen as sinful and a threat to the harmony of the plantation, others will act in ways that will surprise even themselves.

And the women in this story! The long line of strong black women who carry the world on their backs, who birth the children again and again and have them taken away, again and again. The women who put up with the nonsense of men and learn to live in the midst of sorrow with the small amounts of joy they can find. The women that, when the time comes, are armed both physically and emotionally to fight for themselves and those they love.

This is an incredible story of the weight of human cruelty, the harm inflicted on others, and generational trauma. It is about truth and beauty, love and loss, grief and forgiveness, bravery and courage, fear and frailty, hope and despair. It contains stories of those who lived in Africa before the arrival of the ships that dragged them into their huge bellies and sailed them away to their deaths, or to fates even worse. It includes fables and myths, legends and poetry. It is an absolutely unforgettable tale that depicts both the enormous historical events of the time, and also the individual lives of men, women and children caught up in that history. It is a lyrical triumph.

This is a difficult and confronting book to read. It will challenge your world view, even if you think you are one of the enlightened ones who already knew how bad things were then. Reading this book will crack history open and shine a light on all the forgotten or previously unknown details in the most horrific way. It will also give shape and form to the continued Black Lives Matter movement and give depth and meaning to how what has gone before has wrought where we are now.

And beneath this pain, this heartbreaking cruelty and fear, is the abiding love between two people, love that overrides hate, love that makes the unbearable bearable and the intolerable tolerable, love that clings tightly, love that joins together what the world attempts to cleave apart. Love that equals survival. Love that gives and sustains life. Love that exacts revenge and demands forgiveness and asks for mercy. This is a tender novel of the power of love over the force of hate. Powerful, unforgettable, life-changing.