A Mercy

On the day that Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader, agrees to accept a slave in lieu of payment for a debt from a plantation owner, little Florens' life changes irrevocably. She ends up part of Jacob's household, along with his wife Rebekka, Lina their Native American servant, and the enigmatic Sorrow who was rescued from a shipwreck.

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her

A beautiful and important book

Powerful, elemental... The issues Morrison explores go to the root of what humanity is. They could not be more important

Left me trembling at the sheer brilliance of its storytelling and the unassailable dignity of its purpose

So enthralling that you'll want to read it more than once

Varied and authoritative and frequently beautiful

An enduring, evocative read which carefully weaves fragmented, personal experiences into a layered, ambivalent narrative about slavery and the price of freedom

Morrison is at the very height of her powers

For all its restraint, and its sinister stealth, A Mercy is a furious novel, a volley of anger, contempt and sorrow... the rich and seemingly casual evocative accretion of background and narrative slowly tightens its grip until the reader is utterly in thrall

Emotions run deep and twisted in Morrison's fiction; and their outcome is superbly traced in this powerful, flawed and genuinely creative novel

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye , Sula , Beloved , Paradise and Love . She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.