• A new edition of one of the most celebrated slave narratives, written by a former slave who went on to become a leading figure in the British abolitionist movement
• Equiano's personal account of the horrors of slavery is also an exciting adventure story of his travels on the high seas, and as an explorer and merchant in the Caribbean, the Arctic, and America
• Uses the lively 1789 first edition text
• Brycchan Carey's introduction surveys Equiano's role in the abolition debate, the book's style and structure, recent debates about Equiano's birthplace and identity, and the book's increasingly central position among the great works of eighteenth-century literature
• Includes explanatory notes, a glossary of unfamiliar terms, and a gazetteer of places mentioned

    
'I hope the slave trade may be abolished. I pray it may be an event at hand.'
   
Published a few days before the British parliament first debated the abolition of the slave trade in 1789, Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative gives the author's account of his enslavement after his childhood kidnapping in Africa, and his journey from slavery to freedom. Equiano was slave to a captain in the Royal Navy, and later to a Quaker merchant, and he vividly depicts the appalling treatment of enslaved people at sea and on land. He takes part in naval engagements, is shipwrecked, and has other exciting adventures on his travels to the Caribbean, America, and the Arctic.
   
Equiano claimed his own freedom and became an important abolitionist, but his Narrativeis much more than merely a political pamphlet. The most important African autobiography of the eighteenth century, it has achieved an increasingly central position among the century's great works of literature.
  
The introduction to this edition surveys recent debates about Equiano's birthplace and identity, and considers his campaigning role and literary achievements.