Stories of slavery are never easy reads and 'Night Wherever We Go' is certainly difficult for the brutality it contains. Set on a small plantation in Texas, the six female slaves are portrayed as tender souls whose suffering and powerlessness is at the behest of the plantation owners they refer to only as the Lucy's (after Lucifer and fitting for they are the epitome of evil).
An upsetting read that invokes proportionally equal measure of sympathy for the women 😭 and rage towards the Lucy's and their ilk 😠

A stunning, powerful, poignant novel that gives an intimate look into the everyday horror of enslaved women in Texas. Moving and beautifully written, this is an incredibly accomplished debut. A must read.

Excellent and thought-provoking.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and the publishers for letting me read an advance copy of this book.

An absolutely beautiful book, raw and moving. We follow the lives of six slave women in Texas in the 1850s, as they struggle to maintain a sliver of hope and humanity in an utterly inhumane world. The story delves into their relationships with each other, their owners, and other slaves they meet, with a narrative voice both intimate and impersonal. A haunting tale, this will stick with readers long after they've finished it. I highly recommend it.

'Night Wherever We Go' is as dark as it is illuminating. Slavery is never an easy topic to discuss. This story conveys the absolute bewilderment slaves must have felt being plucked from their homeland so far away, and dropped into a new land, new culture, and new rules; variables that continually moved according to the whims of their owners and the constant exchange of ownership. 'And what she understood most about all these white men with guns in this strange and new country was how arbitrary and varied their cruelty could be.' Slaves were treated as one cohesive group of Black Africans but in reality, each came from a different country and had different languages, religions, and cultures. However, they were expected to all get along and form a ragtag community of sorts, 'an exhaustive state of seething. Made only worse by the fact we were stuck together...'.

The book follows six enslaved women, living on a farm in Texas, in the years leading up to the Civil War. They are owned by the Harlows, 'kin of the devil in the most wretched place most of us have known'. The Harlows are poor farmers, often moving to escape debt, only to fail in another location. An uncle wisely tells Charles Harlow to, 'invest in women. They are cheaper than men and more versatile...And best of all, they can breed'. The Harlow's desperation sinks to a new level of depravity; bringing in a 'stockman' to breed more workers, like cattle in a yard. 'You ever seen them put a bull to a heifer? They put them together over and over again.' The women try and work together to claim control over their bodies. Each of them though has their own history to battle against.

The story begins with third-person narration but increasingly zeroes in on the first-person storytelling of each character. As time goes on, everyone is ruled by fear and mistrust. The white slave owners rule by fear, but also live in fear; locking up their slaves at night, before locking themselves in too. 'Evil was always hungry...' Everything begins to spiral toward a climax.

Tracey Rose Peyton delivers, in 300 pages a dense, gripping story. For the women in the story, it really is 'Night Wherever We Go'. For me, this was a great work of literary and historical fiction.

A thought provoking and very interesting read following the brutal lives of the slave women and what they need to do to survive. This is very well written and the relationships between all parties is brilliantly portrayed. A very intelligent read and I feel this will do very well on publication.
Thank you to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the advance review copy.

This is an INCREDIBLE read and nothing that I can say will really do this book justice. It is a thought provoking, poignant and raw read that is well written and has a riveting storyline. It is an incredibly moving and brought me to tears more than once. I loved it,

Night Wherever We Go by Tracey Rose Peyton is set in Texas on a plantation farm and provides an intimate glance into the lives of 6 enslaved women. Their owners (the Lucy’s which they call them after lucifer) are in financial trouble and decide the best way to make money is to make their slaves bear children against their wishes. To do this they hire a stockman. However the women do everything in their power to avoid getting pregnant.

The book is raw, touching and extremely eye opening to the everyday horrors that slave women had to experience at the hands of white Americans as well as what they had to do to survive those circumstances. What I found moving was the development of female friendship in such dark circumstances. I really liked the short chapters and the switches in narrator per chapter.

Thank you Netgalley and Tracey Rose Peyton for this ARC in response for my honest review!

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The slave women don't refer to Mr. and Mrs. Harlow by their names - instead they call them The Lucys, short for Lucifer. And it's easy to see why. The six women of this book find themselves in the 'most wretched place most of us have ever known.' They are treated like meat, offered up to a visiting stockman purely to produce workers for their owner and some of them have already had children torn away by the ruthless Lucys. But these women have a plan and know herbs. They won't be 'caught', not if they can help it. They won't be forced to bear a child, simply to have it ripped from them or watch it suffer as they do.

This is an intriguing book about women and their shared experiences, how what they suffer both binds and divides them at the same time. This, I think, is a complex observation from Tracey Rose Peyton. She refuses to idealise these women but instead, paints them in a much more real way: selfish, vindictive, jealous, bitter, scornful...and yet, we cannot help but empathise for how their hardships stack up on their shoulders.

The first-person narration is difficult, at times, for the narrator never really introduces themselves, never partakes of the action. And yet, perhaps there is something about this invisible woman who observes her friends and their misfortunes - watches them like a ghost.

How easy it would be to believe the story of Patience, Lulu, Alice, Serah and Nan was simply a work of fiction - some horrid dystopia - and yet, we have to acknowledge, as difficult as it is, that theirs is a story drawn from life and history. Theirs is a story that needs to be told.