The Swallows Return

Swallows Return is a novel that tells the story of the 17th Century White Slave Trade as seen through the eyes of an innocent fourteen year old English village girl named Florence Milton. Florence is taken captive, along with the rest of her village, during a Barbary Pirate slave raid on the unsuspecting Sussex village of Alfriston in 1665. The novel charts her life from her early teenage years and on into slavery through the slave markets of Tunis and maps out her partial escape from the horrors of slavery to experience new, even worse horrors as a concubine to the ruthless and degenerate ruler of Tunis. After she enters the Bey’s Harem the novel further charts her meteoric rise within the Bey’s household as a slave mother to the status of Kadin or ‘favourite’ in the Bey’s household and Florence’s equally stellar collapse into disgrace, leading ultimately to her eventual return home to Sussex, where she receives an unexpected reception from her former friends and neighbours. Florence tells her own story through a diary she writes which, after her death, gets lost in the past, until it is rediscovered in modern times, found hidden in the rafters of an old cottage, ironically being renovated by a direct descendant of Florence’s; a descendant who knew nothing about Florence or her extraordinary life story until her diary is discovered revealing the amazing truth of her life.