Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times.
'A beautiful and important book' The Times
On the day that Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader, agrees to accept a slave in lieu of payment for a debt from a plantation owner, little Florens's life changes irrevocably.
With her keen intelligence and passion for wearing the cast-off shoes of her mistress, Florens has never blurred into the background and now at the age of eight she is uprooted from her family to begin a new life with a new master. She ends up part of Jacob's household, along with his wife Rebekka, Lina their Native American servant, and the enigmatic Sorrow who was rescued from a shipwreck.
Together these women face the trials of their harsh environment as Jacob attempts to carve out a place for himself in the brutally unforgiving landscape of North America in the seventeenth century.
'Toni Morrison is the greatest chronicler of the American experience that we have ever known' Tayari Jones, New York Times
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times.
'A beautiful and important book' The Times
On the day that Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader, agrees to accept a slave in lieu of payment for a debt from a plantation owner, little Florens's life changes irrevocably.
With her keen intelligence and passion for wearing the cast-off shoes of her mistress, Florens has never blurred into the background and now at the age of eight she is uprooted from her family to begin a new life with a new master. She ends up part of Jacob's household, along with his wife Rebekka, Lina their Native American servant, and the enigmatic Sorrow who was rescued from a shipwreck.
Together these women face the trials of their harsh environment as Jacob attempts to carve out a place for himself in the brutally unforgiving landscape of North America in the seventeenth century.
'Toni Morrison is the greatest chronicler of the American experience that we have ever known' Tayari Jones, New York Times
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times.
Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.
Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a
divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to
explaining her
*Guardian*
A beautiful and important book
*The Times*
Powerful, elemental... The issues Morrison explores go to the root
of what humanity is. They could not be more important
*Guardian*
Left me trembling at the sheer brilliance of its storytelling and
the unassailable dignity of its purpose
*Evening Standard*
So enthralling that you'll want to read it more than once
*Sunday Times*
Varied and authoritative and frequently beautiful
*New Yorker*
An enduring, evocative read which carefully weaves fragmented,
personal experiences into a layered, ambivalent narrative about
slavery and the price of freedom
*Irish Times*
Morrison is at the very height of her powers
*Daily Mail*
For all its restraint, and its sinister stealth, A Mercy is a
furious novel, a volley of anger, contempt and sorrow... the rich
and seemingly casual evocative accretion of background and
narrative slowly tightens its grip until the reader is utterly in
thrall
*Herald*
Emotions run deep and twisted in Morrison's fiction; and their
outcome is superbly traced in this powerful, flawed and genuinely
creative novel
*Sunday Telegraph*
Nobel laureate Morrison returns more explicitly to the net of pain cast by slavery, a theme she detailed so memorably in Beloved. Set at the close of the 17th century, the book details America's untoward foundation: dominion over Native Americans, indentured workers, women and slaves. A slave at a plantation in Maryland offers up her daughter, Florens, to a relatively humane Northern farmer, Jacob, as debt payment from their owner. The ripples of this choice spread to the inhabitants of Jacob's farm, populated by women with intersecting and conflicting desires. Jacob's wife, Rebekka, struggles with her faith as she loses one child after another to the harsh New World. A Native servant, Lina, survivor of a smallpox outbreak, craves Florens's love to replace the family taken from her, and distrusts the other servant, a peculiar girl named Sorrow. When Jacob falls ill, all these women are threatened. Morrison's lyricism infuses the shifting voices of her characters as they describe a brutal society being forged in the wilderness. Morrison's unflinching narrative is all the more powerful for its relative brevity; it takes hold of the reader and doesn't let go until the wrenching final-page crescendo. (Nov.) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a
divine being, because luck and genetics don't seem to come close to
explaining her * Guardian *
A beautiful and important book * The Times *
Powerful, elemental... The issues Morrison explores go to the root
of what humanity is. They could not be more important * Guardian
*
Left me trembling at the sheer brilliance of its storytelling and
the unassailable dignity of its purpose * Evening Standard *
So enthralling that you'll want to read it more than once * Sunday
Times *
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