4 CITIES, 4 LIVES, 1 CRIME - In Madrid, an Argentinian bookseller gets caught up in the scheme of an American professor to prevent an appalling crime. Her sidekicks soon include a Gambian migrant in Paris and a Spanish waitress in London. Seeking some sort of companionship in their exiles, the four characters join forces in a quest that becomes a dangerous obsession. All four lives seem to be fatefully connected. But how to get people to take the crime seriously if it does not yet exist? In Buenos Aires, the criminals are remorselessly pursued. They cross paths with a Nigerian judge, the wife...

The region between the river Senegal and Sierra Leone saw the first trans-Atlantic slave trade in the sixteenth century. Drawing on many new sources, Toby Green challenges current quantitative approaches to the history of the slave trade. New data on slave origins can show how and why Western African societies responded to Atlantic pressures. Green argues that answering these questions requires a cultural framework and uses the idea of creolization the formation of mixed cultural communities in the era of plantation societies to argue that preceding social patterns in both Africa and Europe...