Headline brings home Shearer’s début

Sherise Hobbs at Headline Review has swooped for a “tense and gripping” début novel about a mother’s desperate search to find her stolen children, set in the Caribbean during the aftermath of slavery. 

Hobbs acquired world rights to Eleanor Shearer’s River Sing Me Home, and another book, from Laurie Robertson at Peters, Fraser + Dunlop. Shearer’s début will launch in spring 2023.  

The novel centres around runaway slave Rachel who knows that “true freedom means finding out what happened to [her five children], even if the truth will be more than she can bear”. Shearer was inspired to write the book after seeing a footnote in an exhibition she was attending about Windrush that mothers in slavery in the British colonies lived in constant fear of their children being sold—and that though the Slavery Abolition Act was passed 1833, in practice that did not necessarily mean freedom for the enslaved, so many mothers went in search of their lost children.       

Hobbs said: ‘I read this book in one tense sitting, absolutely gripped by Rachel’s extraordinary search for her five children sold as infants by her master…Shearer’s canvas is the lush, green landscape of Barbados, British Guiana and Trinidad—the dangerous rivers and the open sea. This book is about the extraordinary lengths to which a mother will go for love. It’s gripping, powerful, joyful and redemptive.” 

London-based Shearer is mixed-race writer lwhose family are part of the Windrush generation. For her masters in politics degree at Oxford she studied the legacy of slavery and her fieldwork in St. Lucia and Barbados helped inspire her first novel. She also currently works at think tank Institue for Government which aims to make government more effective. Her parents are the actor Paul Shearer and producer Vicky Licorish, the latter of whom adapted Andrew Levy’s Small Island for the BBC. 

Shearer said: “[Hobbs and Headline] clearly feel as tenderly towards Rachel as I do, and want to help shed light on this lesser-known part of Caribbean history. It’s a dream come true for the book to have found its perfect home.”