
Property
Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction
Valerie Martin(Author)
Abacus (Publisher)
Published on 4. September 2003
Book
Paperback/Softback
224 pages
978-0-349-11732-4 (ISBN)
Description
WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2003
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.
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.
Reviews / Votes
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 * Reminiscent of Doris Lessing's novel, THE GRASS IS SINGING...Martin's project was not to impose a contemporary sensibility on slavery, but to investigate what the daily fact of its brutality might do to one's interior life * GUARDIAN * She creates a heroine as intriguing as she is repellent. And she forces the reader into the complicity and discomfort of a voyeur * NEW YORK TIMES *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Little, Brown Book Group
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Dimensions
Height: 196 mm
Width: 126 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
181 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-349-11732-4 (9780349117324)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Person
Valerie Martin is the author of six other novels and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi, SALVATION.
