A Mercy

Resumen del libro

In the 1680s the slave trade was still in its infancy. In the Americas, virulent religious and class division, prejudice and oppression were rife, providing the fertile soil in which slavery and race hatred were carefully planted and took root. Jacob is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a smallholding 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, 'with the hands of a slave and the feet of a Portuguese lady', who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Florens is hungry for love, at first from the older servant woman at her new master's house; but later, when she's sixteen, from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives...And all of them have stories: Lina, the native American servant, whose tribe was decimated by smallpox; their mistress Rebekka, herself a victim of religious fervour back in England; young Sorrow, daughter of a sea captain who's spent too many years at sea to be quite...normal; and, finally, there's Florens's own mother back home in Maryland.

Biografía del autor

x{0026}lt;P x{0026}lt;B Toni Morrison x{0026}lt;/B (1931-2019) nació en Lorain (Ohio). Alternó su trabajo de profesora de Humanidades en la Universidad de Princeton con la actividad literaria. En sus obras planteó la problemática de la población negra en Estados Unidos, en especial la situación de las mujeres. Fue autora de las novelas x{0026}lt;I Ojos azulesx{0026}lt;/I (1970), x{0026}lt;I Sula x{0026}lt;/I (1973), x{0026}lt;I La canción de Salomónx{0026}lt;/I (1977, National Book Critics Circle Award en 1978), x{0026}lt;I La isla de los caballerosx{0026}lt;/I (1981), x{0026}lt;I Beloved x{0026}lt;/I (1987, Premio Pulitzer), x{0026}lt;I Jazz x{0026}lt;/I (1992), x{0026}lt;I Paraíso x{0026}lt;/I (1997), x{0026}lt;I Amor x{0026}lt;/I (2003), x{0026}lt;I Una bendición x{0026}lt;/I (2008; Lumen, 2009), x{0026}lt;I Volver x{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2012) y x{0026}lt;I La noche de los niñosx{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2016), y de ensayos como x{0026}lt;I El origen de los otrosx{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2018). x{0026}lt;I La fuente de la autoestimax{0026}lt;/I (Lumen, 2020) es su último libro. En 1993 obtuvo el Premio Nobel de Literatura. Murió en agosto de 2019 en el pequeño pueblo neoyorquino de Grand View-on-Hudson a los ochenta y ocho años de edad.x{0026}lt;/P