The closing event at this year’s History Book Festival, features Tiya Miles

About the book
Harriet Tubman is, if surveys are to be trusted, one of the ten most famous Americans ever born and soon to be the face of the $20 bill. Yet often she’s a figure more out of myth than history, almost a comic-book superhero — the woman who, despite being barely five feet tall, illiterate, and suffering from a brain injury, managed to escape from her own enslavement. She would return again and again to lead others north to freedom without loss of life, speak out powerfully against slavery, and then become the first American woman in history to lead a military raid, freeing some 750 people. You could almost say she’s America’s Robin Hood, a miraculous vision, often rightly celebrated but seldom understood.

Night Flyer changes all that. With tenderness and imaginative genius, Tiya Miles explores beyond the stock historical grid to weave Tubman’s life into the fabric of her world. She probes the ecological reality of Tubman’s surroundings and examines her kinship with other enslaved women who similarly passed through a spiritual wilderness and recorded those travels in profound and moving memoirs. What emerges is a human being whose mysticism becomes the more palpable the more we understand it — a story that offers powerful inspiration for our own times of trouble.