How does a girl become a pirate? Infamous 18^th-century pirate Mary Read tells the story of her childhood in this compelling novel by the award-winning author of The Marlowe Papers.

"The walk to the gallows is a feast of sensation. Nothing lets you know you're alive like Death at your shoulder. Prodded up some badly-carpentered steps, your wrists bound in sisal, your ankles hobbled with iron cuffs, to a platform where your extinction twirls in the breeze in a loop ahead of you. On the fifth step, the protruding slant of a nailhead knocked in by some fellow not caring too much about the finish. Not caring too much about who'd be going up these steps and not coming down again. That slant nail groans through the grain of a tree chopped down and planked to bear your weight, its wood striped with every year it grew. A tree once slender as a finger. Its whole future contained in a seed you could put in your mouth and swallow.

Life shows up to say goodbye. Last taste! says the brain, that roguish companion who steered you into so many holes. Drink it in! says the old thinker. Meaning eyes and ears and nose and every hair on your body, but what you have the most thirst for is air. You suck it deep into your lungs and despite the sun already fierce on your skin, the air comes in cool because the wind is running in strong from the sea. If your eyes are thirsty, nature rises up to satisfy them, willing as that sweet wench at the Fortune. Colours as vivid as they've ever been, any day of your life. Last moments! they shout. Nature puts on a show for those about to fertilise it, whether hung in cages over the water or dug into the ground. Nature gives thanks with yellows so yellow they punch you in the throat. Paragreets screeching laughter in the trees, green as limes. Hibiscus flowers red as a whore's dress. The sky so blue and wide and empty it makes you want to weep for your mother, even if she never much loved you and often wished you unborn. The whole crowd gathered to watch you die ripples like a field of wheat. Behind them, bleached and clustering huts, and behind the huts, the sea shushing you with its ancient song. That old keeper of your history, laying itself over the beach again and again saying miss me, miss me.

The Governor comes out of the low white building where he has been putting on his braids and fakery. The costume required to kill with authority and without penalty..."