Roots by Alex Haley

Now a major BBC drama starring Forest Whitaker, Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Laurence Fishburne

Tracing his ancestry through six generations - slaves and freedmen, farmers and blacksmiths, lawyers and architects - back to Africa, Alex Haley discovered a sixteen-year-old youth, Kunta Kinte.

It was this young man, who had been torn from his homeland and in torment and anguish brought to the slave markets of the New World, who held the key to Haley's deep and distant past.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award