A Mercy Toni Morrison Novel Hardcover

A Mercy
Toni Morrison
167 pages
Gray hardcover
Random House
In the publisher’s fine dust jacket

“one of Morrison’s most haunting works yet” (The New York Times). Octavo, original boards. Signed by Toni Morrison on the title page. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Barbara de Wilde. Jacket design by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

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. A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface