An inventive historical thriller that reimagines the tumultuous presidential election of 1860, capturing the people desperately trying to hold the nation together'and those trying to crack it apart. Abby Kelley Foster arrived in Springfield, Illinois, with the fate of the nation on her mind. Her fame as an abolitionist speaker had spread west and she knew that her first speech in the city would make headlines. One of the residents reading those headlines...

A young slave stitches a quilt with a map pattern which guides her to freedom in the North.

Thirteen-year-old Lakshmi, though poor, enjoys her life until the Himalayan monsoons wash away her family's crops and she is sold to a brothel in India by her stepfather. She remembers her mother's wisdom, "Simply to endure is to triumph," until the day comes that she can reclaim her life.

"Moments after Lisbeth is born, she's taken from her mother and handed over to an enslaved wet nurse, Mattie, a young mother separated from her own infant son in order to care for her tiny charge. Thus begins an intense relationship that will shape both of their lives for decades to come. Though Lisbeth leads a life of privilege, she finds nothing but loneliness in the company of her overwhelmed mother and her distant, slave-owning father. As she...

Two children trapped in the same attic, almost a century apart, bound by a shared secret. Early 1900s London: Taken from his homeland, twelve-year-old Celestine spends most of the time locked away in the attic of a large house by the sea. The only time Celestine isn't bound by confines of the small space is when he is acting as an unpaid servant to English explorer Sir Richard Babbington, As the years pass, he desperately clings on to memories of...

By following the directions in a song, "The Drinking Gourd," taught them by an old sailor named Peg Leg Joe, runaway slaves journey north along the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada.

In Massachusetts in 1771, seven-year-old Olivia learns about freedom from her father's slave, Mingo, who was promised that he'd be freed when the tide was low enough that he could walk to a certain spot offshore.

Virgil Moody vows to never be like his father, a slaveowner. He moves from Savannah to New Orleans and takes Annie with him. While he comes to think of her as his wife, she reminds him they'll never be equal. When their son Lucas is taken from them, Moody will travel through a country on the brink of civil war searching for Lucas, while trying to reconcile his past sins.

" ... A prim and increasingly apprehensive Englishwoman observing the peculiarities-and barely veiled brutality-of a sugar plantation in the nineteenth-century West Indies. A devout black slave whose profoundly Christian sense of justice is about to cost him his life ... As a suspenseful and inescapably damming portrait of the schizophrenia of slavery, Caryl Phillip's book belongs in the company of Beloved and The Confessions of Nat Turner." From...

A nine-year-old slave keeps a diary of his journey to freedom along the Underground Railroad in 1857.