Pirate !

The Caribbean pirate Alexia Dumas’s younger brother Jonas is getting really bored on Turtle Island. He dreams of great adventures, epic combats and treasure, and can’t stand the lessons taught by his father, Aristide, a former lawyer but now a teacher for a handful of free men, women and children, mostly former slaves. So, the day he receives a punishment that he considers unfair, Jonas decides to run away. He wants to discover the world and stows away on a merchant ship. Unfortunately for him the world is not as welcoming as he imagined, and he goes from pillar to post meeting unsavoury characters and getting disillusioned. For war is raising its ugly head in this part of the world. Soon, Americans and English will fight it out in Louisiana, the stronghold of the Lafitte brothers; one of whom, Jean, is Alexia’s mentor. The latter sets off in search of her brother and despite her efforts to the contrary finds herself caught up in the conflict...

The next volume in the “Alexia Saga”. This saga will take us up to the death of our heroine at the end of the 19th century. We follow her as she faces great events and people of the time with the leitmotiv of her using every means to fight for abolition and emancipation...

The author renders thoughtful homage to Alexandre Dumas, both in the choice of his characters’ surnames as in the vitality of the narrative: the succession of actions that give an upbeat tempo alert to adventure, twists and turns, and to treachery and conflicts. However Johan Heliot does not idealise his characters. He describes reality: choices made through the desire for profit, the terrible treatment doled out to sailors by the drunken brutes who passed for their officers. The book is illustrated with a 1758 map showing the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean.