A Mercy

by Toni Morrison

1 of 5 stars 1 rating • 1 review • 3 shelved
Book cover for A Mercy
Shelve It

Bookhype may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases. Full disclosure.

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.
  • ISBN10 0307264238
  • ISBN13 9780307264237
  • Publish Date 11 November 2008 (first published 1 January 2008)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Publisher Random House USA Inc
  • Imprint Random House Inc