The two men were wrapped in a final embrace, their swollen faces barely recognizable and dripping in bright, red blood. Passers-by had kept clear of the fight and now avoided tripping over the dead combatants; there were no other gapers standing nearby. Beside the corpses lay that for which the men had battled to the death: a choice cut of roasted goat. 'What have we come to?” thought Ibrahim, leader of this fractured band of escaped and would-be slaves. 'We are acting like animals without souls.'”
Pirating Slavery, my novel about buccaneers liberating slave ships, will be published in 16 installments twice a week for four months. The 13th chapter appears here:
Books, published as installments, make the story more manageable while heightening the experience of reading. The book becomes a companion and a commentary on your day-to-day life as you read it over the course of a few months. Between chapters, readers have the time to share, talk and speculate about the book.
Try it!
Book serials first appeared in 1836, when a French newspaper published Honore de Balzac. At the same time, in England, Charles Dickens published The Pickwick Papers and ignited a trend. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1851 in 40 installments. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina was published in Russia from 1873 to 1877.