Novels That Shaped Our World: The Empire Writes Back

The second documentary examining fictional writing from three different perspectives considers the subject of race and colonialism. It looks at books including Robinson Crusoe, the first novel ever published in English, in 1719, whose hero was a slave trader, and two famous American novels published more than a century apart - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The programme also comes up to date with titles such as Malorie Blackman's Noughts and Crosses and Paul Beatty's The Sell Out