• Unheard Voices by Malorie Blackman (published by Corgi Books, 2007)

To commemorate the bicentenary of the Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade Malorie Blackman has put together some of the best writing and poetry about slavery by people from today and accounts of freed slaves from the past.

• Rebel Cargo by James Riordan (published by France Lincoln, 2007)

Abena is a rebellious Ashanti girl sold into slavery on the notorious transatlantic route from West Africa to Jamaica. Mungo is an English orphan who becomes a cabin boy, only to be kidnapped and sold as a white slave. Together they escape and set out towards the Blue Mountains - where rumours tell of a stronghold of runaway slaves ruled by a legendary leader called Nanny...

• Pirates by Celia Rees (published by Bloomsbury, 2004)

Nancy Kington and Minerva Sharp are two young women from very different backgrounds. Nancy, the daughter of a successful Bristol ship owner had her life all planned out. She lived in comfort and hoped to marry her childhood sweetheart William. But disaster strikes and she is aghast to experience her circumstances turning upside down when her father dies. Soon she finds herself shipped out to land they own in the West Indies to marry for the good of the remaining family...

• The First of Midnight by Marjorie Darke (published by Barn Owl Books, 2007)

The year is 1797 and in Bristol a slave called Midnight works as a bare-knuckle boxer. Midnight can’t see any way in which he will ever be able to shake off the chains of slavery. However, he feels some hope when he meets the orphan Jess, whose existence is almost as bleak as his...

• The Door of No Return by Sarah Mussi (published by Hodder Children’s Books, 2007)

Zac lives with his grandfather, Pops. When Pops is killed by muggers, Zac is devastated. Dumped with foster parents, then in an orphanage, Zac stumbles from trouble to trouble, but the one thing he hangs on to is Pops’ obsession with their family history and his ambition to go to Ghana in search of a ransom paid by a descendant 200 years earlier, to keep his son from slavery -- a ransom stolen by British government agents at the time, which then disappeared...

• Cat Among the Pigeons by Julia Golding (published by Egmont Books Ltd, 2006)

As gripping as The Diamond of Drury Lane, this second volume by Julia Golding sees Cat storm a gentleman’s club, jump aboard a slave ship and enter the heart of the shadiest part of London - blindfolded! We discover that Pedro’s slave master has come over from the West Indies to track the boy down and drag him back into slavery...

• Chains by Frances Mary Hendry (published by Oxford University Press, 2004)

Juliet wants to prove to her father that a girl can be just as good as a boy when it comes to business, and so she changes places with her brother and sets sail on her father’s ship on its next voyage to Africa and America. But Juliet’s adventure turns into a nightmare when she realises the full horror of the trade her father is engaged in - the slave trade, at its height in the late eighteenth century...