The forced abduction of the albino Muse brothers at the end of the 19th century, and their circus career as travelling freaks, was one of the many tragedies of the black American experience. Beth Macy tells a story that offers both intricate personal history of the unfortunate Muses and a wider picture of the harshness of life in rural Virginia, the “heart of the Jim Crow South”. It is from there that the Muse brothers were abducted by a travelling carnival, sparking a 28-year struggle by their mother Harriett to retrieve them.

Macy describes a nightmarish world, where the national KKK had a membership of 5 million and, if you were black, casual discrimination and often brutal violence awaited. George and Willie Muse were unusual in that they had curly blond hair and blue eyes, which led their captors to exhibit them as circus freaks across the world, from Paris to New York, shunting them around like so much human baggage, bought and sold by “managers” as nothing more than commodities. A grim and compelling story.

• Truevine by Beth Macy is published by Macmillan (£18.99). To order a copy for £16.14, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846