Description

A Mercy by Toni Morrison (2008, 1st ed.)

Toni Morrison’s A Mercy is a haunting and elegantly woven historical novel set in late‑17th‑century colonial America, where slavery, servitude, and survival shape every connection. At the center of the story is Florens, a sixteen‑year‑old enslaved girl given away by her mother to a trader, Jacob Vaark, in a desperate act meant to protect her from a cruel plantation master. On Vaark’s New York farm, Florens joins a fragile, makeshift household that includes Rebekka, Vaark’s wife; Lina, a Native American woman; and Sorrow, a girl of mixed heritage—all bound by loss, displacement, and the brutal realities of a society built on human bondage. Together, their intertwined stories reveal themes of abandonment, motherhood, survival, and the shifting, uncertain nature of mercy itself. A Mercy stands as one of Morrison’s most incisive explorations of early America—a lyrical, unsettling portrait of a world before race was fully codified, yet already deeply scarred by inequality, violence, and the search for belonging.

Copyright: This first edition hardcover copy was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2008 with cover art using an oil painting called, “Morning in the Tropics” by Frederic Edwin Church, 1877.

Condition: Good. First Edition.

U.S. media mail shipping included.

ISBN-10: 0307264238

ISBN-13: 9780307264237

Dewey Decimal: 813.54