Property

Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. She misses her family and longs for the vibrant lifestyle of her native New Orleans, but most of all, she longs to be free of the suffocating domestic situation. The tension revolves around Sarah, a slave girl who may have been given to Manon as a wedding present from her aunt, whose young son Walter is living proof of where Manon's husband's inclinations lie. This private drama is being played out against a brooding atmosphere of slave unrest and bloody uprisings. And if the attacks reach Manon's house, no one can be sure which way Sarah will turn ...Beautifully written, Property is an intricately told tale of both individual stories and of a country in a time of change, where ownership is at once everything and nothing, and where belonging, by contrast, is all.

Winner of Orange Prize for Fiction 2003 (UK)

“This fresh, unsentimental look at what slaveowning does to (and for) one's interior life must be a first. And the writing - so prised and clean-limbed - is a marvel.”

'A wonderful novel, vivid, revealing' - Carol Shields 'This fresh, unsentimental look at what slaveowning does to (and for) one's interior life must be a first. And the writing - so prised and clean-limbed - is a marvel.' - Toni Morrison 'Tightly constructed . deftly sustained . [a] subtly cadenced novel of racial and sexual trangressions' - Joyce Carol Oates, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

Valerie Martin is the author of six other novels and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi, SALVATION

Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. She misses her family and longs for the vibrant lifestyle of her native New Orleans, but most of all, she longs to be free of the suffocating domestic situation. The tension revolves around Sarah, a slave girl who may have been given to Manon as a wedding present from her aunt, whose young son Walter is living proof of where Manon's husband's inclinations lie. This private drama is being played out against a brooding atmosphere of slave unrest and bloody uprisings. And if the attacks reach Manon's house, no one can be sure which way Sarah will turn . . .Beautifully written, PROPERTY is an intricately told tale of both individual stories and of a country in a time of change, where ownership is at once everything and nothing, and where belonging, by contrast, is all.

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