What will you be doing for Black History month this year?

Historian and novellist Steve Martin's first children's book JUPITER WILLIAMS is published by Hachette next month. It tells the story of a wealthy young African living in London at the turn of the nineteenth century. Set prior to the abolition of slavery in period when the issue was being hotly debated, what would a boy like Jupiter have made of it all? Black History is too frequently concerned with a few well known names or with the treatment of Black people as victims of the slave trade. Important as this may be it is a partial history and Steve's novel provides an insight into a less familiar history. Highly recommended.

Published on 3rd October, Write Away has produced teachers' notes and reading group prompts for this important novel.

Download the notes in PDF format

Workshop at The Museum of London

SYNOPSIS: London 1800, Jupiter is young, black, living at the African Academy in Clapham with other boys from wealthy Sierra Leonean families. His life is a mixture of privilege and dispossession as he copes with the cruelty of his teachers, the rivalries and tensions among his diverse schoolmates, a consuming sense of duty towards his younger brother Philip and guilt over the death of another brother in Africa three years ago. Throughout Jupiter strives to maintain his dignity, his Christian faith and pride in his roots. But beyond the relative ease of Clapham lies another London, where poor black communities struggle for survival along the squalid reaches of the Thames. A world where Jupiter's education and background mean nothing and skin colour alone determines fate - into this world his younger brother Philip vanishes, and Jupiter is obliged to follow !

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