NATIONAL BESTSELLER The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, likeBeloved, it is the story of a mother and a daughtera mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.

One of theNew York Timess 100 Best Books of the 21st Century

Spellbinding. . . . Dazzling. . . . [A Mercy] stands alongsideBelovedas a unique triumph. The Washington Post Book World

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.

Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

• Publisher: Vintage (August 11, 2009)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 208 pages
• ISBN-10: 0307276767
• ISBN-13: 9780307276766
• Item Weight: 7.4 ounces
• Dimensions: 5.15 x 0.6 x 7.95 inches