A Mercy (Paperback) ~ Toni Morrison (Author) Cover Art

A Mercy (Paperback)

By: Toni Morrison (Author)

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Review

"[Toni Morrison's] astonishing new novel, A MERCY, has both X-ray eyes and telepathic powers, not to mention tree rings, ice caps, pottery clocks, carbon clouds, a long memory, and a short fuse."

"A MERCY conjures up the beautiful, untamed, lawless world that was America in the 17th century with the same sort of lyrical, verdant prose that distinguished [BELOVED]."

"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." (starred review)

Publisher's note

A powerful tragedy distilled into a jewel of a masterpiece by the Nobel Prize-winning author of "Beloved" and, almost like a prelude to that story, set two centuries earlier.
In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class divisions, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were planted and took root.
Jacob 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, "with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady." Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, but later from a handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved.
There are other voices: Lina, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress, Rebekka, herself a victim of religious intolerance back in England; Sorrow, a strange girl who's spent her early years at sea; and finally the devastating voice of Florens' mother. These are all men and women inventing themselves in the wilderness.
"A Mercy" reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart it is the ambivalent, disturbing story of a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and of a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
Acts of mercy may have unforeseen consequences.

"From the Hardcover edition."

In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman, and then from a handsome free blacksmith--in a novel set in late seventeenth-century America, by a Nobel Prize-winning author. A best-selling New York Times Book of the Year.

In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman, and then from a handsome free blacksmith--in a novel set in late seventeenth-century America, by a Nobel Prize-winning author. A best-selling New York Times Book of the Year.

Annotation

In the ninth novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison (BELOVED) the characters must face the oppression of a 17th-century form of slavery that had nothing to do with race, and everything to do with power and poverty. The protagonists of A MERCY are a motley crew of disenfranchised laborers--orphans, Native Americans, immigrants, and indentured servants--who must unite against the crushing weight of the injustices that formed the foundation of the United States, that led to the institution of slavery, and that to this day provide a vice-lock on the lives of the poor. Selected as one of the New York Times 10 Best Books of 2008.

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