Scattered Seed

Three sisters navigate the horrors of the Middle Passage in a powerful historical novel about family, honor, and the will to live, by the author of The Daughter of Union County.

Timbuktu, western Africa, 1706. Folashade, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a professor of linguistics, is sent south with her older sisters, Bibi and Adaeze, to endure the painful ceremony that a girl on the cusp of womanhood is expected to.

In Djenné, on the banks of the Niger, the sisters’ fate and that of their fellow Bambara are changed forever when they’re kidnapped, marched toward grueling indignities on Gorée Island, and eventually hauled aboard an English slaver bound for the Americas. Before they are inevitably separated, Folashade, Bibi, and Adaeze plot to keep their memories alive.

Drawing from her ancestry, Francine Thomas Howard gives an authentic voice to the horrors of the Middle Passage—and an empowered one to a girl who is determined to survive, to honor her father and Timbuktu, and to ensure that her and her sisters’ names will never be forgotten.