I heard about this novel via word of mouth. They made it sound like it was the most epic and intense piece of literature they had ever read. Intense is a proper description. This book is, ugh. I found a new limit.

I got about a quarter into this before deleting this from my e-reader. Was this written by a 15 year old? It came across as amateurish and slight. Rambling passages that were in dire need of an editor, weak attempts at creating pathos with the suicide and depression sequence - i felt nothing and no sympathy for these two people supposedly at the end of their rope and undergoing unimaginable hardship, going into cheap horror "thrills" that came across like something like a reddit post or piece of bad fan fiction. Unlike many inner-city children Emmanuel-Jones had access to nature, thanks to his father’s allotment, where he grew an array of vegetables, including Jamaican varieties. “Being in an environment where you’re with nature, watching things grow, in a sense it became my sanctuary,” he says. That environment provided inspiration for him to, one day, own a farm.

These white cattle farmers are so much ahead of us it’s like we’re playing catch-up. They already know how to get the grant money, they already have old money,” Coleman says. “I mean, my dad was a sharecropper who worked 40 years in a factory 12 hours a day. Growing up, my father didn’t know about these programs.”

We have so much food on our land we just started giving it away.” The farm was converted into an emergency food distribution center. They made canned spaghetti sauce from tomatoes and included it in food boxes along with berries, greens, potatoes and other items from the garden. After working in the catering industry Emmanuel-Jones enrolled on a training scheme that led to a job working for Peter Bazalgette on the BBC television series Food and Drink. He later continued to work in television, as a producer and director for 15 years and appeared in the Robert Llewellyn production Carpool on 22 January 2010.

Ratings and reviews

Willowbrook is a family affair, with the couple’s five children involved to varying degrees, as well as partners. The two eldest sons, for example, are employed on the farm. Lutfi believes that several barriers prevent people of colour from gaining access to land, particularly inheritance, education and wealth.