Bristol in 1787 is booming, a city where power beckons those who dare to take risks. Josiah Cole, a small dockside trader, is prepared to gamble everything to join the big players of the city. But he needs capital and a well-connected wife.

Marriage to Frances Scott is a mutually convenient solution. Trading her social contacts for Josiah's protection, Frances finds her life and fortune dependent on the respectable trade of sugar, rum, and slaves.

Into her new world comes Mehuru, once a priest in the ancient African kingdom of Yoruba, now a slave in England. From opposite ends of the earth, despite the difference in status, Mehuru and Frances confront each other and their need for love and liberty.

"This moral spellbinder, set in Bristol, England, in the slave-trading 1780s, is being freshly issued a decade after publication Although the sentences are not as fine as in Gregory's current work (The Other Boleyn Girl etc.), and the plot takes some awkward leaps, the book brilliantly shocks the conscience with its intimate and unsparing portrait of slavery. It's a romance, but not a sentimental one, built around the impossible love between white slave owner Frances Scott Cole and the black African Mehuru, a priest and adviser to his king before being kidnapped and designated as property. A strength of the book is that although Gregory, as usual, makes us feel the second-class status of 18th century women, she draws no cheap comparison between Frances' status as silk-clad chattel (to her gaspingly ambitious slave-trader husband, Josiah's) and the rigors and terrors of a black slave's life. Superb portraits abound, especially that of Josiah's sister, Sarah, a cranky spinster who makes poetry of her pride in being a member of the trading class, eagle-eyed at the account books. Gregory's vivid portrait leaves one feeling complicit; as the abolitionist Doctor Hadley notes: 'the cruelty we have learned will poison us forever.'" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"The latest page-turner from Gregory (The Boleyn Inheritance) is a sobering account of the English slave trade, with a bit of romance thrown in.... A vivid depiction of the trade and the ruined lives left in its wake." Kirkus Reviews

"Philippa Gregory is a mesmerizing storyteller."

-- The Sunday Telegraph (London)

"The great roar and sweep of history is successfully braided into the intimate daily detail of this compelling and intelligent book."

-- Penny Perrick, The Times (London)

In a breakthrough novel that has all the power of Roots and The Thornbirds, Philippa Gregory has created a haunting tale of forbidden love and exhilaration, a rich and poignant story that sets individuals against a society devastated by intolerance and greed.

It was to be a respectable marriage to a man engaged in a respectable business. Certainly 34-year-old Frances Scott, forced into genteel poverty despite an aristocratic heritage, has little choice but to wed the lower class Bristol shipping merchant.

Trading her social connections for his protection in the brutally male-dominated world of eighteenth-century England, Frances discovers that her husband's "respectable" trade-- dealing in African slaves-- will propel her into a passionate fight for romance, life and the freedom of the slave she comes to love deeply.

A saga of desire and shame, of dramatic confrontations between convention and truth, "A Respectable Trade" is a disturbing and yet truly satisfying novel from "the first lady of intelligent historical fiction."

Philippa Gregory is the author of fourteen books, one of which, Wideacre, was a New York Times bestseller. She holds a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century literature from the University of Edinburgh and lives in England.