The Good Lord Bird

Kansas Territory, 1856. Henry Shackleford, a young enslaved boy, is swept into John Brown’s antislavery band after violence kills Henry’s father. Brown mistakes him for a girl, and Henry—nicknamed Onion—maintains the disguise because it offers protection. His comic, sceptical narration follows Brown’s family and followers through hunger, preaching, raids and the confused warfare of Bleeding Kansas.

Onion later encounters Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman as Brown searches for support for an armed attack on slavery. The journey ends at Harpers Ferry in 1859, where Brown’s certainty collides with the limited force he has assembled. The novel uses humour, exaggeration and a deliberately unreliable narrator to examine heroism, identity and the distance between white abolitionist plans and the choices of the Black people they intend to liberate.