A Mercy

"This rich little masterpiece is a welding of poetry and history and psychological acuity that you must not miss."  -  Ron Charles, The Washington Post 

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.

"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."  -   Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

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.

Orange Prize Nominee for Fiction Longlist (2009), James Tait Black Memorial Prize Nominee for Fiction (2008)