Our reading group selection and discussion for February is Property by Valerie Martin. Copies are in stock at Book Beat now and are discounted 15%. This Zoom meeting will be held on Tuesday, February 28th at 7 pm. If you’d like to attend and are not receiving a link to our meetings, please RSVP with your name, phone number and email and we’ll add you to our reading group list. Reminders and login links are sent on the morning or day of the meeting. Please try and login 5-10 minutes early so we can begin on time.
Valerie Martin’s Property delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery’s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress. Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the backdrop of an impending slave rebellion, Property unfolds with the speed and menace of heat lightning, casting a startling light from the past upon the assumptions we still make about the powerful and powerful.
“This fresh, unsentimental look at what slave-owning does to (and for) one’s interior life must be a first. The writing—so prised and clean limbed—is a marvel.” —Toni Morrison
“Chilling…disturbing…intriguing. A compelling contest of wills between two women…against a chaotic backdrop of black night and leaping torchlight.” —The New York Times
“Quietly devastating…. Shows a dimension of American slavery that nonfiction could not get across…. A work of sustained irony…. As chilly and arresting a picture of slavery as you’ll find anywhere.” —The Boston Globe
“It is possible that we have never heard a voice like this before… a timeless, chilling voice, eerily like the voice of the German people after the Holocaust… [With it] Valerie Martin opens a window on that evil of human nature that makes one group of people less than another.” —Winston-Salem Journal
“So riveting that once you start reading this slender novel, it’s unlikely you’ll put it down. A bitter, mesmerizing account of the caustic costs of slavery.” —Detroit Free Press
Valerie Martin is the author of twelve novels, including Trespass, Mary Reilly, Italian Fever, and Property, four collections of short fiction, and a biography of St. Francis of Assisi . She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as the Kafka Prize (for Mary Reilly) and Britain’s Women’s Prize (for Property.)
Valerie Martin’s most recent novel I Give It To You was published by Nan A. Talese/Random House in 2020. Sea Lovers, a volume of new and selected short fiction, also from Nan A. Talese, was published in August of 2015 and is now available in paper from Vintage press.
Three volumes of a trilogy for middle-grade readers Anton and Cecil: Cats at Sea, Anton and Cecil: Cats on Track, and Anton and Cecil: Cats Aloft, co-written with Valerie’s niece Lisa Martin, began publication from Algonquin in October of 2013. The final volume appeared in the fall of 2016.
Valerie Martin has taught in writing programs at Mt. Holyoke College, University of Massachusetts, and Sarah Lawrence College, among others. She resides in Madison, Ct.