D’Aguiar is part of a younger group of talented Black British writers and critics including David Dabydeen and Caryl Phillips who bring to their novels a multi-layered awareness of the aesthetic, cultural, literary, and political debates surrounding race and representation. His first and most critically acclaimed work was The Longest Memory, a gripping novel that plays with voice and time, documenting life on a plantation during a time of slavery.

The Longest Memory is narrated through different characters including: a slave, his son and granddaughter, a cook, a plantation owner and his daughter, the plantation owner’s workers, the overseer and the overseer’s son. A further voice comes from the editor of the slavers’ journal, The Virginian. These differing accounts offer a combination of emotional and intellectual responses to the same events. Each are presented within the philosophical construct of the character and reflect both the saddest of times and a glimmer of hope. The myriad of views give colour and rich depth to the novel showing dimension to an often oversimplified time. The retelling of events from various points of view, as D’Aguiar himself acknowledges, creates a circular structure. In many ways the text repeats like a sad memory, never letting the reader fully move on without a chance of it intruding on the mind again, after all ‘memory is pain trying to resurrect itself’.

Fred D’Aguiar’s books of poetry and fiction have been translated into a dozen languages with The Longest Memory and Dear Future well received for their intensity and intelligence. The Longest Memory won the Whitbread First Novel Award despite critics contending that D’Aguiar’s experimentation with narrative form caused his works to suffer from a lack of focus and depth. The counterargument suggests that D’Aguiar is a pioneer in the modern storytelling phenomenon regarding slavery in the United States. Before the era of Black Lives Matter, of harassment in coffee shops, of President Trump, who has been both overtly racist and also dismissive of racism, and of the disappointment at the first black president having been able to make little real change to poverty, criminalisation and exclusion, D’Aguiar finds the central nerve of reflective stories about slavery.

Like 12 Years a Slave, Feeding the Ghosts and The Bluest Eye, this text pulls no punches and lets the audience sit in the realisation of the author naming something African Americans work hard to avoid: how lonely they are to still live in a foreign land. Karla Holloway, professor of English at Duke University, says: ‘The irony is that the loneliness, is our collective legacy. We work hard to escape and slip past that loneliness, but inevitably we are captured, again, by the wake of slavery, a tidal wash as reliable as moonrise.’