Olaudah Equiano was kidnapped as a child from his village in Africa and shipped to America to begin life as a slave. This book recounts his amazing journey to freedom and how he eventually helped to put an end to slavery. The text and pictures graphically portray his life aboard ship, on the plantations and later life in the English gentry.

* Emerald/Band 15 books provide a widening range of genres including science fiction and biography, prompting more ways to respond to texts.

*Text type - A biography

* There is a useful glossary and a timeline of Olaudah's life to help children recount the information.

* Curriculum links - Citizenship : to realise the nature and consequences of racism; Geography: To recognise how places fit together within a wide geographical context.

* This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

This book features in the following series: Collins Big Cat, Emerald Series .

. This book is part of a reading scheme, meaning that it is a book aimed at children who are learning to read. This reading scheme has multiple levels. This reading book uses the phonics method. This approach concentrates on teaching children how to map between sounds and spellings, allowing them to decode written words into their constituent sounds. Phonics skill thus involves being able to split the written word 'cat' into the phonemes /k/, /a/, /t/, and to map from letter 'c' to phoneme /k/, from letter 'a' to phoneme /ae/ and from letter 't' to phoneme /t/. Decoding skill is useful when reading unfamiliar words which use regular spelling sequences.

There are 48 pages in this book. This book was published 2007 by HarperCollins Publishers .

Paul Thomas is a political, strip and gag cartoonist from the United Kingdom whose work has appeared in Punch magazine, The Spectator, Private Eye, The Sunday Times, The Independent, Daily Telegraph, The Guardian). As a comic illustrator his cross-genre caricatures and location drawings have appeared on Channel 4 and Sky Television. An Unreliable History of Tattoos is his first book. Collins UK has been publishing educational and informative books for almost 200 years. Victor Ambrus is a well-known illustrator of over 300 children's picture books.