Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup was a free man, a carpenter and violinist with a wife and children in New York State, when in 1841 two strangers lured him to Washington with the promise of work, drugged him and sold him into slavery. He spent twelve years on cotton and sugar plantations in Louisiana under a series of masters, some humane and one savagely cruel, unable to reveal who he was, until a Canadian carpenter agreed to carry a letter north and his family won his freedom.

Northup published his account in 1853, the year he was freed, and it is among the most detailed records of plantation life by someone who endured it. Rob Marland reads it alone, in about eight hours.