Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor -- William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation -- as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping...

A gripping, radically intimate debut novel about a group of enslaved women staging a covert rebellion against their owners. On a struggling Texas plantation, six enslaved women slip from their sleeping quarters and gather in the woods under the cover of night. The Lucys--as they call the plantation owners, after Lucifer himself--have decided to turn around the farm's bleak financial prospects by making the women bear children. They have hired a "stockman"...

From USA Today bestselling author and Christy Award Hall of Fame inductee Tamera Alexander comes the story of two women from different centuries living in the same house who share strikingly similar journeys. Claire Powell's life is turned upside down when her beloved husband admits to a "near affair." But when Stephen accepts a partnership with an Atlanta law firm without consulting her and buys a historic Southern home sight-unseen--it pushes their...