A Mercy

About this book

A powerful tragedy distilled into a small masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved and almost like a prelude to that story set two centuries earlier. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader in 1680s United States when the slave trade is still in its infancy. Reluctantly he takes a small slave girl in part payment from a plantation owner for a bad debt. Feeling rejected by her slave mother 14-year-old Florens can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens looks for love first from Lina an older servant woman at her new masters house but later from the handsome blacksmith an African never enslaved who comes riding into their lives . . . At the novels 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.