Mercy - Hardcover

Morrison, Toni

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0676978304 ISBN 13: 9780676978308

Publisher: Random House of Canada Ltd, 2008

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her" (Guardian)

"A beautiful and important book" (The Times)

"Powerful, elemental... The issues Morrison explores go to the root of what humanity is. They could not be more important" (Guardian)

"Left me trembling at the sheer brilliance of its storytelling and the unassailable dignity of its purpose" (Evening Standard)

"So enthralling that you'll want to read it more than once" (Sunday Times)

Book Description:

Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House of Canada Ltd
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0676978304
• ISBN 13: 9780676978308
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 167