Why I Wrote Trevannock
On reversing history to tell the truth about it
What if the ships had sailed the other way?
What if it was Europe’s villages that were raided, Europe’s people who were chained into the holds, Europe’s names that were crossed out on a manifest and replaced with something the empire could pronounce? What if Benin had become the jewel of the western world, built on three centuries of conquered labour, and the great continent had looked across the ocean at the cold northern parishes and seen not equals, not even enemies — just resource?
That is the world of Trevannock. That is the world of Crossing-kin.
I did not build this world to be provocative. I built it because I believe it is the only way to make certain people feel what they have so far only been asked to understand.
I am a Nigerian-British man. I have carried two histories for as long as I can remember — one that the world celebrates, one it would rather move past. I have watched people engage with the history of the transatlantic slave trade as a fact, an event, something that happened and has since been processed. I have watched the anger that history produced — the anger that is still being produced, every day — treated as something unreasonable. Something to be managed.
I wanted to write a book that made that anger make sense. Not through argument. Through experience.
If you have never had to think about what it means to be reduced to a category, to have your name erased, your language made irrelevant, your beliefs dismissed — Trevannock puts you in those chains. Not metaphorically. On a ship called the Iyalode, in 1782, in the dark of the lower deck, with the Black Water moving beneath you and a continent you will never see again receding behind. The empire that took you is indifferent to your arrival. It does not notice you have come.
That is what I needed people to feel.
I have wanted to write this book for many years. I started it more than once. Stopped. I am not a trained writer, and for a long time the gap between the story I could see and the words I could lay down felt permanent.
Then AI changed what was possible.
I run a technology consultancy. I have a family. I made a clear-eyed decision: the story mattered more than the method, and if a new tool existed that could help me bring it into the world — not write it for me, but work with me, be shaped by me — I was going to use it. What you are reading is the story I always meant to tell. Every choice in it is mine. The craft that made it possible is new. I have no reservations about that, and I will not pretend otherwise.
There are five books in this series. Trevannock is the first.
I want this series to serve both Whites and non-White readers — for different reasons, I expect. For some, perhaps recognition. A mirror, finally, tilted in a direction that reflects something true about the world and about the cost of empire. For others, perhaps something harder and more valuable: the beginning of genuine understanding. Not guilt. Not performance. Understanding.
Because the misconception I most want to dismantle — across all five books, across every chapter — is the one about Black anger. Where it comes from. What it actually is. It is not unreasonable. It is not irrational. It is centuries deep, and it belongs to all of us to reckon with.
I want us to get to a world where our colours and our histories are not erased — but dwarfed. Dwarfed by love, and by the understanding of one another.
That world starts here.
— Anthony Adeloye