Quotes from book
The Salt Roads

The Salt Roads

Nebula Award Finalist: This “sexy, disturbing, touching, wildly comic . . . tour de force” blends fantasy, folklore, and the history of women and slavery (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). In 1804, shortly before the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue is renamed Haiti, a group of women gather to bury a stillborn baby. Led by a lesbian healer and midwife named Mer, the women’s lamentations inadvertently release the dead infant’s “unused vitality” to draw Ezili—the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love—into the physical world. As Ezili explores her newfound powers, she travels across time and space to inhabit the midwife’s body—as well as those of Jeanne, a mixed-race dancer and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire living in 1880s Paris, and Meritet, an enslaved Greek-Nubian prostitute in ancient Alexandria. Bound together by Ezili and “the salt road” of their sweat, blood, and tears, the three women struggle against a hostile world, unaware of the goddess’s presence in their lives. Despite her magic, Mer suffers as a slave on a sugar plantation until Ezili plants the seeds of uprising in her mind. Jeanne slowly succumbs to the ravages of age and syphilis when her lover is unable to escape his mother’s control. And Meritet, inspired by Ezili, flees her enslavement and makes a pilgrimage to Egypt, where she becomes known as Saint Mary. With unapologetically sensual prose, Nalo Hopkinson, the Nebula Award–winning author of Midnight Robber, explores slavery through the lives of three historical women touched by a goddess in this “electrifying bravura performance by one of our most important writers” (Junot Díaz).


Nalo Hopkinson photo

“Desire makes us all babies again.”

Source: The Salt Roads (2003), p. 180

Nalo Hopkinson photo
Nalo Hopkinson photo

Similar authors

Nalo Hopkinson photo
Nalo Hopkinson 22
Jamaican Canadian writer 1960
Donna Strickland photo
Donna Strickland 4
Canadian physicist, 2018 Nobel prize winner
Avril Lavigne photo
Avril Lavigne 17
Canadian singer-songwriter and actress
Jim Carrey photo
Jim Carrey 21
Canadian-American actor, comedian, and producer
Keanu Reeves photo
Keanu Reeves 39
Canadian actor, director, producer and musician
Justin Bieber photo
Justin Bieber 35
Canadian singer-songwriter, record producer, and actor
Patrick Rothfuss photo
Patrick Rothfuss 236
American fantasy writer
Gerard Way photo
Gerard Way 1
American musician and comic book writer
Markus Zusak photo
Markus Zusak 214
Australian author
Laurell K. Hamilton photo
Laurell K. Hamilton 261
Novelist