A Mercy

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In “one of Morrison’s most haunting works” (The New York Times)the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart like Beloved it is the 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.. One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. 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.