New York Times Bestseller
"An incredible document, amazingly told and structured. Tough, but riveting. " -The New York Times Book Review
Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing, vividly detailed, and utterly unforgettable memoir, about one of the darkest periods in American history. Now the major motion picture and winner of three Academy Awards.
Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, Twelve Years a Slave recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.
After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life. It became an immediate bestseller and today is recognised for its unusual insight and eloquence as one of the very few portraits of American slavery produced by someone as educated as Solomon Northup, or by someone with the dual perspective of having been both a free man and a slave.
Praise
"Shooting [12 Years a Slave], I had an out-of-body experience. There's a scene where my character's being brought to the slave ship - and he revolted. So the [slave drivers] beat him. They beat him to the point where he ... We kept filming that scene over and over again. Around the fourth or fifth take, I looked up at the sky and something came over me - I got a glimpse of what it must have been like for my ancestors - and I broke down, I could not stop screaming and crying." - Michael K. Williams
"I could not believe that I had never heard of this book. It felt as important as Anne Frank's Diary, only published nearly a hundred years before ... The book blew [my] mind: the epic range, the details, the adventure, the horror, and the humanity ... I hope my film can play a part in drawing attention to this important book of courage. Solomon's bravery and life deserve nothing less." -Steve McQueen, director of 12 Years a Slave
"Frightening, gripping and inspiring ... Northup's story seems almost biblical, structured as it is as a descent and resurrection narrative of a protagonist who, like Christ, was 33 at the time of his abduction ... Northup reminds us of the fragile nature of freedom in any human society and the harsh reality that whatever legal boundaries existed between so-called free states and slave states in 1841, no black man, woman or child was permanently safe." -Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
"For sheer drama, few accounts of slavery match Solomon Northup's tale of abduction from freedom and forcible enslavement." -Ira Berlin
"If you think the movie offers a terrible-enough portrait of slavery, please, do read the book ... The film is stupendous art, but it owes much to a priceless piece of document. Solomon Northup's memoir is history ... His was not simply an extraordinary story, but an account of the life of a great many ordinary people." -The Daily Beast
"An incredible document, amazingly told and structured. Tough, but riveting. The movie of it by Steve McQueen might be the most successful adaptation of a book ever undertaken; text and film complement each other wildly." -Rachel Kushner, The New York Times Book Review
"The best firsthand account of slavery." -James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Battle Cry of Freedom, in The New York Times Book Review
'The most remarkable book ever issued from the American press.' -Detroit Tribune
