by Toni Morrison · 2008
In 1680s colonial Virginia, the trader Jacob Vaark takes in Florens, an enslaved girl offered to him by her mother in payment of a debt, to join the household of women bound to his remote farm. Told in shifting first-person voices, the novel traces how Jacob's death from smallpox and the fragile bonds among these women unravel the household, while Florens searches for the free black blacksmith she loves.