In 1860 Louisiana, eighty-year-old Madame Sylvie decides to sit for a portrait, as horrific stories that span generations from the big house and the fields are revealed.

NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • Family drama and the legacy of slavery haunt this epic tale of an enigmatic stranger in Jefferson, Mississippi—from one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century. 

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works...

"The Kitchen House continues the story of Jamie Pyke, son of both a slave and master of Tall Oakes, whose deadly secret compels him to take a treacherous journey through the Underground Railroad...This...stand-alone novel opens in 1830, and Jamie, who fled from the Virginian plantation he once called home, is passing in Philadelphia society as a wealthy white silversmith. After many years of striving, Jamie has achieved acclaim and security, only...

In 1870, Reconstruction brings big changes to the Louisiana sugar plantation where spunky ten-year-old Sugar has always lived, including changes to her friendship with Billy, the son of her former master, and the arrival of workmen from China.

When Caroline Wimbley Levine returned to Tall Pines Plantation, she never expected to make peace with long-buried truths about herself and her family.

When a plantation proprietor and former slave--now possessing slaves of his own--dies, his household falls apart in the wake of a slave rebellion and corrupt underpaid patrollers who enable free black people to be sold into slavery.

"A groundbreaking historical novel from a heralded author that explores the seldom discussed Puerto Rican Atlantic Slave Trade. At a time when importing humans from Africa had been prohibited by the Spanish Crown, Pola and other slave women provide their master with babies who are immediately taken away and sold on the auction block. Her serial rapes by a number of men are routine and often provided entertainment for the master and his friends. Understandably...

From National Book Award finalist Susan Straight comes a haunting historical novel about a Louisiana slave girl's perilous journey to freedom.Daughter of an African mother and a white father she never knew, Moinette is a house maid on a plantation south of New Orleans. At fourteen she is sold, separated from her mother without a chance to say goodbye. Bright, imaginative and well aware of everything she risks, Moinette at once begins to prepare for...

Nore arrives at her stepmother's Louisiana plantation to find her new family odd, and an aura of evil and mystery about the place.

"The story of a mulatta woman, a slave and concubine, determined to take control of her own destiny in a society where that would seem impossible"--Provided by publisher.