Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous t...more

This classic memoir of slave life, written by a highly-literate North Carolina slave, was first published at the beginning of the Civil War when Jacobs had escaped to the North and begun campaigning for abolition. Her narrative focused especially clearly on the ways that slavery degraded women through sexual abuse and the separation of mothers from...more

Refiner's Fire book 3 Kitty, a house slave, always figured it was easiest to do what she’d always done--obey Missy and follow orders. But when word arrives that the Yankees are coming, Kitty is faced with a decision: will she continue to follow the bidding of her owners, or will she embrace this chance for freedom? Never allowed to have ideas of ...more

Valerie Martin’s Property delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery’s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship...more

THEBONDWOMAN'SNARRATIVE tells the story of Hannah Crafts, a young slave working on a wealthy North Carolina plantation, who runs away in a bid for freedom up North. Her compelling story provides a fascinating view of American life in the mid-1800s and the literary conventions of the time. Written in the 1850s by a runaway slave, THEBONDWOMAN'S NARR...more

A reissue of the classic biographical novel that has sold more than 200,000 copiesLalu Nathoy’s father calls his thirteen-year-old daughter his treasure, his “thousand pieces of gold,” yet when famine strikes northern China in 1871, he is forced to sell her. She is sold first to a brothel, then to a slave merchant bound for America. In a new ...more

In 1963 rural Georgia, with the Vietnam War cranking up, pregnant seventeen-year-old Adie Jenkins discovers the diary of pregnant seventeen-year-old Tempe Jordan, a slave girl, begun as the Civil War was winding down. Adie is haunted by the memory of her dead sister; Tempe is overcome with grief over the sale of her three children sired by her mast...more

In the 21st-century Kingdom of Versailles, the roads are terrible and Paris is a dirty little town. Serfdom and slavery are both common, and no one thinks that's wrong. Why should they? Most people spend their lives doing backbreaking farm work anyway. But teenaged Khadija, daughter of a prosperous family of Moorish business travellers, is unfazed...more