A Mercy

Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER – The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the story of a mother and a daughter–a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

One of the New York Times‘s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

“Spellbinding. . . . Dazzling. . . . [A Mercy] stands alongside Beloved as a unique triumph.” —The Washington Post Book World

In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master’s house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.
Binding Type: Hardcover
Author: Toni Morrison
Published: 11/11/2008
Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
ISBN: 9780307264237
Pages: 176
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 0.88″ H x 9.56″ L x 5.88″ W

Award: 2010 ALA Notable Books Winner – Fiction

About the Author
Toni Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities, Emerita, at Princeton University. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in Rockland County, New York, and Princeton, New Jersey.