A mercy - Toni Morrison

National Bestseller

One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year

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.

A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But
at its heart, like Beloved, it is the ambivalent, disturbing 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.