Queen of Freedom: Defending Jamaica

THE THRILLING TRUE STORY OF HOW ONE WOMAN MASTERMINDED SLAVE RESISTANCE to British rule in eighteenth-century Jamaica - part of the True Adventures series

1720. Blue Mountains, windward Jamaica. High above the army camps and plantations of the British Empire, a group of ex-slaves - called Maroons are building a new home for themselves.

When British soldiers enter the forests to hunt them down, one of the Maroons will lead the fight against them - Queen Nanny, a ’wise woman’ with a reputation for ancient obeah magic, and a guerrilla fighter of genius. Under her generalship, her people will make a do-or-die defence of their freedom.

Catherine Johnson, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has written many titles for younger readers with a historical setting. Sawbones, a murder mystery set in eighteenth-century London, won the Young Quills Award for Best Historical Fiction 2015. The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo is about a cobbler’s daughter from Devon who, in the early nineteenth-century, passed herself off as a Princess from Indonesia. Catherine is half-Jamaican and knows the Blue Mountains well.