Kia ora and welcome to the Reading Doctor! Each week, literary critic and devoted reader Dr Louise recommends books to us on a particular theme, or responds to reader questions. Send us your questions for her by emailing: communications@read-nz.org

This week, our Reading Doctor looks at a selection of novels that explore the dark world of human slavery.

December the 2^nd is the United Nations international day for the abolition of slavery. These novels all attempt to represent the unimaginable. Though some of them – written in a different time with a different sensibility – have since become controversial as appropriative or patronising, they each had enormous impact in the era of their publication, and some of them played a concrete part in changing both the law and public opinion.

· In Kentucky as civil war looms, an enslaved groom forges a bond with a foal which will go on to become the greatest racehorse in American history, in Horse by Geraldine Brooks.

· Published in two volumes in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is a landmark of protest literature, an influential anti-slavery novel which focussed on the character of a long-suffering slave, since criticised for popularising negative stereotypes.

· The legacy of slavery as it haunts the present is explored in Beloved by Toni Morrison, as the inescapable weight of history bears down on the individual.

· The long-lasting and very personal effects of the enslavement of the Moriori is explored in Tina Makereti’s novel Where the Rēkohu Bone Sings.

· An imagined first-person narrative by the leader of a slave rebellion in Virginia in 1831, The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron is a story told to his lawyer as he awaits execution.

· Alex Haley’s research into his own origins led him to write Roots: The Saga of an American Family, tracing his genealogy back to a village in The Gambia from which his teenage ancestor was abducted, transported to Maryland and sold to a Virginia planter.

· In Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel charting the effects of slavery on contemporary American culture, Invisible Man, a black man’s travels through America chart a nightmarish racial divide.

· The story of four generations of African-American women chart a movement from slavery to freedom, in Cane River by Lalita Tademy.

· In Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner details the rise and fall of one Thomas Sutpen, a poor man who moves to Mississippi to gain wealth and power, and whose story mirrors the rise and fall of Southern plantation culture.

· Modelled on slave narratives and incorporating time travel, Kindred by Octavia Butler is a first-person narrative by a young African-American writer who travels back in time to pre-Civil War Maryland where she meets her enslaved ancestors.

· Sugar, rum and slaves are the commodities which make and break fortunes in 18^th-century Bristol, in Philippa Gregory’s novel A Respectable Trade.