Coma

Having survived a deadly assault, Mellissa Harris was taken to hospital, where she was put into a medically induced coma.Whilst unconscious, she was transported back in time to relive the life of her 19th-century namesake, an English girl called Mellissa Goodchild, who was an abolitionist. She married the son of an English landowner, and she and her new husband set off to Jamaica immediately after their marriage to run a sugar plantation which had been newly bought by her father-in-law and her husband. The plantation was worked by nearly 400 slaves.Is it a 21st-century detective story? Yes, some of it.Is it a 21st-century life-and-death hospital drama?Yes, some of it.But mainly, it is a 19th-century slave story set in Jamaica during the build-up to the Christmas slave rebellion of 1831-32. And it is a love story between the abolitionist wife of a white sugar plantation and slave owner, and an African slave, both unwittingly caught up in the rebellion.

Evelyne Morris was born in England towards the end of WW2, in 1944, but she comes from an international cultural background. Her grandparents were French/Italian and Maltese/Greek, and she was brought up in a college with foreign students from all over the world – Europe, the Far East, the Middle East, Africa and South America. She has a brother and sisters-in-law from Spain, France, and Japan, and she has daughters-in-law from Brazil and South Korea. She started writing after retirement, and this is her second novel.