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. And if the attacks reach Manon's house, no one can be sure which way Sarah will turn. This private drama is being played out against a brooding atmosphere of slave unrest and bloody uprisings. 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. She misses her family and longs for the vibrant lifestyle of her native New Orleans. 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. Property is Valerie Martin's powerful, startling novel set in America's deep South in the early nineteenth century: a story of freedom, both political and personal.

This private drama is being played out against a brooding atmosphere of slave unrest. In Property, Martin explores the inner and outer lives of a woman caught up in the perverse historical fact of slavery.

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.

Property by valerie martin