River Called Time

by Courttia Newland

2021448 pages

A River Called Time imagines a world where there was no migration from the Caribbean to Britain, no colonies for the SS Empire Windrush to set sail from, and, most profoundly, no ship taking enslaved Africans across the Atlantic in the first place. The premise of A River Called Time is a world without colonialism and slavery. In Newland's imagination, contact between Europeans and Africans in the early modern period took the form of a convivial meeting of equals. The fruit of this cultural exchange is a twenty-first-century London that is almost unrecognizable. It is now known as Dinium, its dominant mode of religious and cultural life is a form of African cosmology, and Christianity is practised by a minority (and even its followers are influenced by African sources).