An American Slave in Barbary by Larry Kelley

 

I’m pleased to be taking part in the Coffee Pot Book Club blog tour for An American Slave in Barbary by Larry Kelley. This compelling work of historical fiction follows the extraordinary journey of an American sailor caught in the brutal world of Barbary slavery, offering a vivid and thought-provoking glimpse into a lesser-known chapter of history. As part of the tour, I’m delighted to be sharing more about the book and its themes, so do settle in and join me as we explore this powerful and immersive story.

✔️ Inspired by forgotten American history
✔️ A sweeping, Homeric-style adventure
✔️ Explores freedom, identity and survival
✔️ Richly atmospheric and action-packed
✔️ A powerful journey of endurance and redemption

Check out the blurb:

A Homeric American Novel 

An American Slave in Barbary: The Odyssey of Winston Prescott Jones is the story of a first-generation American student whose commercial ship is captured in the summer of 1801 by Moslem pirates. He spends the next sixteen years as a captive in Algiers. He rises to become a confidant to the Dey of Algiers, who is desperate to know what made the American shopkeepers and farmers believe they could defeat the British war machine, and how they intended to rule themselves.

In the genre created by Homer, it is a tale of suffering, sin, and redemption, and a young man's epic journey to regain his freedom.

Excerpt

As he knelt to unlock us from our place next to the deckhouse, his hands shaking, our ship was only a stone’s throw from the sandbar. At nearly the same instant as the chain connecting all our leg irons released us, a massive wave rose under our stern, tipping the entire vessel up at a surreal angle and us onto the sandbar.  In the same instant, we were violently thrown against the bulwarks as a torrent of seawater flooded over us. We then ran aground with an explosion of sound like the discharge of fifty cannons and with such tremendous centrifugal force that our main mast snapped like a brittle twig and crashed into the surf. Moments later, after a brief lull, the next wave pulled the water back from the sandbar, causing the ocean to form a menacing wall of on-rushing water, which then exploded down on us with even greater force.

Just before that wave crashed over us, I looked into my younger brother’s eyes as he clung for dear life to some of the mainmast rigging, scattered across the deck. In the next instant, he was gone, swept overboard. I was washed off the deck into the impact zone of huge waves crashing over the sandbar, where I was held under and thrown into the furious white water. Struggling to hold my breath, every fiber in my body struggled for air. Knowing in just seconds, I would involuntarily suck in saltwater and drown, I opened my eyes and saw brown sand-filled water swirling around my face, with light showing me the way to the surface. When my head popped out of the water, I took a huge gasp of air and felt it rush through my body, all the way down to my toes. For an instant, I could see land, the thin strip of green and light-brown, and beautiful blue sky above.

“I want to live!’ I cried.

I turned around to see another wall of white water rushing toward me, and I was again churned under and tossed about. This time, I opened my eyes quickly to determine the way the surface. Again, I was given only seconds of air at the surface before being tumbled under. Each time I surfaced; the precious narrow strip of land looked smaller. It struck me—I was being carried out to sea, a tiny twig in a huge current.

An American Slave in Barbary: The Odyssey of Winston Prescott Jones is available now in Kindle, paperback and hardback. If you’re drawn to immersive historical fiction, epic journeys, and forgotten chapters of history brought vividly to life, this is a book not to be missed. You can buy it HERE.

Larry Kelley is a writer and a contract negotiator in the construction industry and whimsically describes himself as an adventurer and an early developer of the modern skateboard. He attended the University of California at Santa Barbara and earned a B.A. in English Literature. In between readings of Keats and Wordsworth, he took up surfing and zealously adopted the resident neo-beat-generation surfing subculture of Isla Vista, the off-campus “youth ghetto” overlooking the Pacific. Reminiscent of the narrator in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, soon after graduation and with practically no money, Kelley embarked on several solo, madcap, endless-summer surfing explorations beginning with sojourns at the international surfing Mecca of Biarritz, France, and moved on to Lisbon, Tangiers, Casablanca as well as other unnamed, hang-outs and breaks in southern Morocco and the Spanish Sahara. After a surf trip to the Caribbean and Central America, Kelley moved to Vail, Colorado, to ski and write his first novel. From Vail, he moved to San Francisco and was an account manager in commercial security and a freelance writer. His articles appeared in many publications, including Human Events Magazine, Townhall Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. During this period, Kelley returned to the mountains with his good friend, Christian Lustic, and climbed the five tallest peaks in the lower 48 states, including the Grand Tetons in Wyoming.

While in San Francisco, he met his future wife, the alluring Deborah Dickson. “I snatched her from a group of suiters in a move worthy of James Dean,” says Kelley. Although she disputes Kelley’s version of their meeting, she recounts, “He proposed, and I accepted his proposal after a whirlwind eight weeks.”

Today, they have two loving and successful sons, Brendan, a world-class skier, and Austin, an international surfer, both inheriting their father’s love of adventure and learning. “If it weren’t for my wife, I would have failed in life, and my sons would not be where they are today. She has been our gift from God,” he says.

In 2012, Kelley’s epochal book, Lessons from Fallen Civilizations, appeared to great acclaim. It not only answers many questions raised by the attacks of 9/11 but chronicles the rise of and causes for the fall of five great civilizations. It is a saga that begins on the plain of Marathon in 490 BC and ends with the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1918. Its main character is Western Civilization.

Today Kelley’s new book is a historical fiction novel, "An American Slave in Barbery – The Confessions of Tyler Prescott Jones". It is an allegory for the present and, like his first book, an adventure story that makes us remember – Freedom is always under siege.

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