A Mercy
  • Published: 1 June 2009
  • ISBN: 9780099502548
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $24.99

A Mercy

Formats & editions
EBook
1 Jul 2010
Paperback
1 Jun 2009
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Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times.

'A beautiful and important book' The Times

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's life changes irrevocably.

With her keen intelligence and passion for wearing the cast-off shoes of her mistress, Florens has never blurred into the background and now at the age of eight she is uprooted from her family to begin a new life with a new master. 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.

Together these women face the trials of their harsh environment as Jacob attempts to carve out a place for himself in the brutally unforgiving landscape of North America in the seventeenth century.

‘Toni Morrison is the greatest chronicler of the American experience that we have ever known’ Tayari Jones, New York Times

BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED

Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
  • Published: 1 June 2009
  • ISBN: 9780099502548
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 176
  • RRP: $24.99
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About the author

Toni Morrison

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.

portrait photo of Toni Morrison

Also by Toni Morrison

Recitatif
Beloved
The Bluest Eye
Sula
Mouth Full of Blood
Race
God Help the Child
See all

Praise for A Mercy

Morrison is at the very height of her powers

Daily Mail

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

Guardian

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

Evening Standard

A beautiful and important book

The Times

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

Sunday Times

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

Herald

Varied and authoritative and frequently beautiful

New Yorker

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

Irish Times

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

Sunday Telegraph

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

Guardian

A truly brilliant story that should be much better known

Bernice McFadden, author of SUGAR, Guardian