A never-before-released Zora Neale Hurston book focusing on black life in America is now set to arrive in 2018. 

The HarperCollins book, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave, is an unfinished work that tells the true story of "the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade that was illegally smuggled from Africa on the last ‘Black Cargo’ ship to arrive in the United States,” through a series of interviews.

Although Hurston is best known today for her fiction works like Their Eyes Were Watching God, she also did quite a bit of research and journalism during her life. She won a Guggenheim fellowship to study culture and religion in Jamaica and Haiti, and reported on several important race and civil rights issues of her day.

The new book comes from field work Hurston conducted in 1927, when she went to Plateau, Alabama to interview 95-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Lewis was the last living American who had traveled to the New World in a slave ship. 

Hurston interviewed Lewis multiple times over the course of four years. He told her all about the raid that led to his capture, and about his bondage 50 years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States. Lewis' story is unique because it is represents a detailed account of a slave's life in Africa before bondage.

Lewis' narrative also details the horrors of being held in a barracoon for selection by American slave drivers, the horrific journey of the Middle Passage packed with more than 100 aboard the ship the Clotilde and the years he spent in slavery until the end of the Civil War.

As has become her trademark, Hurston's detailed writings capture Lewis' unique vernacular, and Harper has already begun to suggest that this new book will join the writer's others in the hall of American classics. 

"Barracoon, like her other works, brilliantly illuminates the tragedy of slavery and one life forever defined by it. Offering insight into the pernicious legacy that continues to haunt us all, black and white, this poignant and powerful work is an invaluable contribution to our shared history and culture."

The book is currently set for release next May, just in time for your summer reading lists!