A Mercy

Toni Morrison

Knopf Canada, Aug 11, 2009 - Fiction - 224 pages

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 master's house, but later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives . . .

At the novel's 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.

Contents

• Section 1: 3
• Section 2: 10
• Section 3: 42
• Section 4: 50
• Section 5: 79
• Section 6: 84
• Section 7: 119
• Section 8: 137
• Section 9: 159
• Section 10: 168
• Section 11: 184
• Section 12: 190

About the 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.

Bibliographic information

• Title: A Mercy
• Author: Toni Morrison
• Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2009
• ISBN: 030737307X, 9780307373076
• Length: 224 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / African American & Black / General; Fiction / Coming of Age; Fiction / Literary