Strange Stories

In late Victorian England, a Black man educated at Oxford prepares to return to Africa as a missionary, stirring a quiet English village to uncomfortable attention. The Reverend John Creedy was taken from a slaver on the Gold Coast as a child and raised among Britain's intellectual elite, yet when he arrives in Walton Magna to raise funds for his mission, he finds that education and refinement cannot shield him from the country's deepest prejudices. Ethel Berry, a young woman raised to revere foreign missions as life's highest purpose, finds herself drawn to Creedy with a force that unsettles both her ideals and her community. Through this and other tales of scientific obsession and moral transgression, Grant Allen constructs a fascinating period piece that grapples unflinchingly with questions of identity, belonging, and whether love can transcend the color line. The prose carries a anthropologist's eye for social detail and a reformer's quiet indignation at the contradictions of Empire.