"A provocative new novel from the best-selling author of Snow Falling on Cedars--a moving father-son story that is also a taut courtroom drama and a bold examination of privilege, power, and how to live a meaningful life. In a small rural town outside Seattle, Joanna, an Ethiopian girl adopted by a white fundamentalist Christian family, is found dead of hypothermia in her own backyard--setting in motion a gripping journey into the complexities of...

"In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina,...