In a brilliantly layered narrative, Phillips combines his own observations with the stories of figures from the past. The experiences of an African trader in nineteenth-century Liverpool are contrasted with Phillips's experience of the city, where, as a Caribbean black, he is scorned by the city's "native" blacks. His interactions with American Pan-Africanists coming "home" to Ghana are paired with the account of a British-trained African minister in eighteenth-century Accra who turned a blind eye to the slave trade flourishing around him. The story of a white judge who disrupted "the natural order" in Charleston by integrating the Democratic primary in 1947 is set against Phillips's search for the remnants of the "pest houses" where slaves were "seasoned" before being sold. Phillips weaves these narrative threads together with acute insight and a novelist's grasp of time, place, and character. The result is a provocative and unexpected book, at once historically illuminating and profoundly affecting.