One of the best books I've ever read

I've been reading The Warmth Of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.

It's the story of the Great Migration of black Americans from the South to the North and West told through the lives of three people.

There's Ida Mae Gladney, the wife of a sharecropper who leaves Mississippi in the 1930s after a family member is almost beaten to death by a white man over the disappearance of a turkey, and begins a new life in Chicago.

There's George Swanson Starling who gets out of Florida one step ahead of a lynch mob, moves to New York and then spends his life working the trains that conveyed millions of people between the New world and the Old.

Finally there's Robert Pershing Foster, a doctor who marries into the coloured aristocracy of Georgia but has to head out to the West Coast to escape the shadow of his father in law.

It's not a standard account of a journey from darkness to light. In fact the journey was from a life that was unbearable but simple to a life that was tolerable but increasingly difficult to negotiate.

If, like me, you've grown up absorbing ideas about the Great Migration through references to it in music, reading this opens up a whole world you never guessed at.

Every night when I put it down I said to myself "this is one of the best books I've ever read".