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Set in the 18th century, this novel follows Rohini and Vidia, growing up in an Indian village, before being seduced by tales of Plantation Albion. There they find they have been sold into slavery. Having abandoned their families and their culture, they must now learn how to live with themselves.

This tale reinvents William Hogarth's famous painting of 1732 which tells the story of a whore, a Jewish merchant, a magistrate and a quack doctor, bound together by sexual and financial greed.

David Dabydeen's Turner is a long narrative poem written in response to JMW Turner's celebrated painting 'Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead & Dying'. Dabydeen's poem focuses on what is hidden in Turner's painting, the submerged head of the drowning African. In inventing a biography and the drowned man's unspoken desires, including the resisted temptation to fabricate an idyllic past, the poem brings into confrontation the wish for renewal and the inescapable stains of history, including the meaning of Turner's painting.

Turner was described Caryl Phillips as 'a major poem, full of lyricism and compassion, which gracefully shoulders the burden of history and introduces us to voices from the past whose voices we have all inherited', and by Hanif Kureishi as 'Magnificent, vivid and original. The best long poem I've read in years.'

In addition to the title poems, Turner contains selections from David Dabydeen's two earlier books, Slave Song (1984) and Coolie Odyssey.