Property

By Valerie Martin

Subjects: Slave insurrections in fiction, Plantation life, Domestic fiction, Women slaves, Large type books, Fiction, historical, general, Slavery, Plantation owners' spouses in fiction, Women slaves in fiction, Historical fiction, Mistresses in fiction, Louisiana, fiction, Plantation life in fiction, Slavery in fiction, Louisiana in fiction, Fiction, Mistresses, Slave insurrections, Plantation owners' spouses, Triangles (Interpersonal relations)

Description: Valerie Martin’s **Property** delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery’s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress. Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the backdrop of an impending slave rebellion, **Property** unfolds with the speed and menace of heat lightning, casting a startling light from the past upon the assumptions we still make about the powerful and powerful.