A Mercy
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Overview
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - In "one of Morrison's most haunting works" (The New York Times), 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 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.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780307276766
- ISBN-10: 0307276767
- Publisher: Vintage
- Publish Date: August 2009
- Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 0.46 pounds
- Page Count: 208
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New paperback choices for reading groups
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A Mercy
By Toni Morrison
The Nobel Prize-winning author returns with another masterwork, a brief novel set on the east coast of America during the 1600s. Florens, a young slave girl, is given to a sympathetic plantation owner named Jacob Vaark in order to pay off a debt incurred by her owner. Located in upstate New York, Jacob’s farm is home to a group of women who are struggling to make lives for themselves. Rebekka, Jacob’s wife, endures the deaths of her children from the harsh conditions of plantation living—a tragedy that makes her question her trust in God. Lina, a 14-year-old Native American who lost her family to smallpox, helps Jacob run the farm. She feels suspicious of a fellow servant named Sorrow—an odd young girl—and hopes to stave off loneliness by bonding with Florens. But when Jacob becomes sick, the women’s lives and the meager stability afforded by plantation existence are endangered. Narrated by each of the women in turn, the book offers a panoramic view of America during the 17th century. The hardships her characters experience—both physical and spiritual—are recounted in vivid and poetic detail by Morrison, who is unmatched when it comes to writing about America’s troubled history. Fierce and thrilling, this is an unflinching examination of our country’s coming-of-age and of the dynamics of slavery. A reading group guide is available online.
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By Erin McGraw
Set in the 1920s, McGraw’s fifth book is a charming historical novel with an ambitious heroine at its center. Seventeen-year-old Nell Plat is an uncommonly gifted seamstress who makes dresses for the women of Grant Station, Kansas, where she lives with her husband and two infant daughters. Nell’s failure as a cook, however, has a damaging effect upon her marriage, and so she decides to take off for Hollywood and create a new identity for herself. Relying on a French grammar book and her own ingenuity, Nell adapts an exciting new persona—that of Madame Annelle, seamstress to the wealthy, an identity that opens unexpected doors. She eventually marries an oilman named George Curran and has a third daughter, Mary. But Nell’s break with her old life isn’t as clean as she’d hoped, and the past eventually comes back to haunt her. Her two daughters—full-grown, liberated flappers—track her down in California. Adopting an air of elegance and using the names Lisette and Aimée, they have big dreams of taking Hollywood by storm. Nell tries to play them off as her younger sisters, but the deceit soon fails—as do the rest of her lies. A richly detailed narrative about one woman’s quest to transform herself and find the happiness she craves, McGraw’s book brims with the joie de vivre of the Roaring ’20s. This is a fast-moving narrative that fans of literary fiction will love.