From his Windrush generation mum to his enslaved and enslaver ancestors, Peter Brathwaite tells a dramatic and uplifting history of Barbados that swells with sadness, rings with laughter and rises in song

Boom tick tick, boom tick tick …

When Peter’s mum, a retired NHS nurse, gives him his grandpap’s traditional cooking stick, Peter’s investigation into his complex heritage begins. Travelling to the Caribbean island of Barbados, he discovers that he is descended not only from a family of eighteenth-century sugar-plantation owners, but also from people that they enslaved. Peter’s emotional reckoning in the archives of his white forebears mingles with a counter-archive of Black life which embodies the island’s history, from the rebel sounds of Bajan folk songs to the mischievous acts of carnival character Shaggy Bear.

Peter’s freewheeling – and sometimes shocking – journey into the lives of his family leads him to the violent insurrection of 1816, and to the pioneering Margaret and her husband Addo, landowning Free People of Colour. Scholarly, surprising, tune-filled and tender, Insurrection reveals the unexpected ways that resistance meets oppression, and generously opens the door to a richer understanding of the colonial experience and the stories we share.