Mercy (Hardcover) ~ Toni Morrison (Author) Cover Art

Mercy (Hardcover)

By: Toni Morrison (Author)

More About this Product
List Price: $23.95
Tower Price: $14.99
You Save: $8.96 (38%)
Add to BagAdd to Bag Click to go directly to the checkout.
This item qualifies for FREE Shop N' Save Shipping for orders over $25. Check individual shipping price. *Some Restrictions Apply.
Availability: In Stock
Also Available in: [Paperback] | [Audio]
Share This:
Add To KaboodleAdd To Kaboodle  Submit To Digg!Submit To Digg!  Share On FacebookShare On Facebook  Add to FavoritesAdd to Favorites  TwitterTwitter 

Product Description

Run a Quick Search on "Mercy" by Toni Morrison to Browse Related Products:

Browse more products related to "Mercy"

Browse more products related to "Toni Morrison"

Review

"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)

"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]."

"[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."

Publisher's note

In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith--in an evocative novel set against late seventeenth-century America, by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved. 300,000 first printing.

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.

Editorial Reviews

TOWER.COM REVIEW

MORE ABOUT THIS TITLE

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.

MORE ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the author of many novels, including Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. She has also received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction.

PRAISE FOR THIS TITLE

“A horrifying act stood at the center of Toni Morrison’s 1987 masterwork, Beloved: a runaway slave, caught in her effort to escape, cuts the throat of her baby daughter with a handsaw, determined to spare the girl the fate she herself has suffered as a slave. A similarly indelible act stands at the center of Ms. Morrison’s remarkable new novella, A Mercy, a small, plangent gem of a story that is, at once, a kind of prelude to Beloved and a variation on that earlier book’s exploration of the personal costs of slavery–a system that moves men and women and children around ‘like checkers’ and casts a looming shadow over both parental and romantic love.

Set some 200 years before Beloved, 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 that earlier novel. . . . Ms. Morrison has rediscovered an urgent, poetic voice that enables her to move back and forth with immediacy and ease between the worlds of history and myth, between ordinary daily life and the realm of fable. . . . A heartbreaking account of lost innocence and fractured dreams, [that] also stands, with Beloved, as one of Ms. Morrison’s most haunting works yet.”
–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Spellbinding . . . Dazzling . . . [A Mercy] stands alongside Beloved as a unique triumph in Morrison’s body of work. The lush poetry and amorphous structure of [the novel] reflect the story’s distant setting in the mist of America’s creation, when independence and the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution were still a century away. . . . Morrison, who has written so powerfully of catastrophe, cruelty and horror, here adds to that song of tragedy equally thrilling chords of desire and wonder, which in their own way are no less tragic. Where Beloved ends with the cathartic exhaustion of an exorcism, A Mercy concludes with an ambiguous kind of prayer, redolent with possibility and yearning but inspired by despair. This rich little masterpiece is a welding of poetry and history and psychological acuity that you must not miss.”
–Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World

Customer Reviews for "Mercy (Hardcover)" by Toni Morrison (Author)

Average Customer Review
5 out of 5 stars ( [1 customer review] ) 

Share your thoughts with other customers:
 [Submit your ReviewSubmit your Review] 

Most Recent Customer Reviews
5 out of 5 stars Touching novel, December 8, 2008
By book reviewer
"A Mercy" is a touching, heartfelt novel about loneliness, slavery, and strained family ties. Toni Morrison is an accomplished novelist, and this book demonstrates her skill as a writer. A great read, deeply personal and emotional, that enfolds in a heartfelt and intriguing story.

Explore More Great Tower Sales & Specials

Tower.com BOOK Sales, Promotions & Special Features

Tower.com Popular Book Wiki Articles

  • The Paperback
    Learn more information on the paperback format before choosing which type of book to purchase.
  • The E-Book
    What exactly is an "electronic book?" Learn before you buy with Tower Wiki!
  • The Audio Book
    Do you prefer to read or be read to? Learn more about this increasingly popular book format.

Interact with Tower.com