"Martin's heroine is as complex and disaffected as Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening--how could she be otherwise when she is herself no more than 'property'? A wonderful novel, vivid, revealing."

"In this stunningly powerful novel, Valerie Martin's gifts--a fearless originality and seemingly limitless perspective combined with a cool and elegant intelligence--are all on splendid display."

Set in the surreal heat of the antebellum South during a slave rebellion,Property takes the form of a dramatic monologue, bringing to the page a voice rarely heard in American fiction:the voice of a woman slaveholder.Manon Gaudet is pretty and petulant, selfabsorbed and bored. She has come to a sugar plantation north of New Orleans as a bride,bringing with her a prized piece of property, the young slave Sarah, only to see Sarah become her husband's mistress and bear his child. As the whispers of a slave rebellion grow louder and more threatening, Manon speaks to us of her past and her present, her longings and dreams--an uncensored, pitch-perfect voice from the heart of moral darkness.

Property is riveting fiction, fast, richly plotted, shimmering with visual detail. It is also an invitation to reexamine the traditions of the Southern novel and the myth of the chivalrous South and a haunting meditation on what Valerie Martin has called "the fantastic and constant perversity of the oppressor to feel victimized by the oppressed."