Excerpt from Washington Black by Esi Edugyan, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I could see the flesh on his face and hands, waxen and bloodless. His lips were pink, his eyes a very piercing blue. Slowly he walked the line of our bodies, staring at each of us in turn. I could hear Big Kit breathing roughly above me and I understood she too was fright­ened. When the master looked at me, I felt the scorch of his gaze and lowered my eyes at once, shivering. The air was stagnant, redolent of sweat.

Then the man in white gestured behind him, to the overseer. That man twisted the handles of the barrow, dumping its load in the dirt.

A murmur passed through us, like a wind.

Sprawled there in the dirt, in a heap of grey clothes, was Wil­liam's corpse. His face was a rictus of pain, his eyes bulging, his tongue black and protruding. Some days had passed since his death, and strange things were happening already to his body. He looked corpu­lent, bloated; his skin had become mottled and spongy. A slow horror filled me.

The master's voice, when at last he called out to us, was calm, dry, bored.

"What you see here, this nigger, killed himself," Erasmus Wilde said. "He was my slave, and he has killed himself. He has therefore stolen from me. He is a thief." He paused, folded his hands at the small of his back. "I understand that some of you believe you will be reborn in your homelands when you die." He looked as though he might say more, but then he fell silent and, turning abruptly, gestured to the overseer at the barrow.

That man crouched over the body with a large curved skinner's knife. He reached around and cupped his callused palm under Wil­liam's chin and began to saw. We heard the terrible wet flesh tearing, the crunch of the bones, saw the weird, lifeless sag of William's body as the head came away.

The overseer stood and raised the severed head in both hands. Then he walked back to the barrow and took out the long wooden post. Hammering it into the dry earth, he drove William's head onto the sharp end.

"No man can be reborn without his head," the master called out. "I will do this to each and every new suicide. Mark me. None of you will ever see your countries again if you continue to kill yourselves. Let your deaths come naturally."

I stared up at Kit. She was peering at William's head on its spike, the bulge of its softening flesh in the sun, and there was something in her face I had not seen in her before.

Despair.

Excerpted from Washington Black by Esi Edugyan. Copyright © 2018 by Esi Edugyan. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.