Island Beneath The Sea

Born a slave on the island of Saint-Domingue Zarit? —
known as T?t? — is the daughter of an African mother she
never knew and one of the white sailors who brought her
into bondage. Though her childhood is one of brutality and
fear T?t? finds solace in the traditional rhythms of
African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through
her fellow slaves. When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain
arrives on the island in 1770 it’s with powdered wigs in
his baggage and dreams of financial success in his mind.
But running his father’s plantation Saint-Lazare is
neither glamorous nor easy. It will be eight years before
he brings home a bride — but marriage too proves more
difficult than he imagined. And Valmorain remains
dependent on the services of his teenaged slave. Spanning
four decades Island Beneath the Sea is the moving story of
the intertwined lives of T?t? and Valmorain and of one
woman’s determination to find love amid loss to offer
humanity though her own has been battered and to forge her
own identity in the cruellest of circumstances.