"If Harris did feel sophomore jitters, then Amity, his 2025 follow-up, certainly doesn't show them. This is a smart, sensitive and very assured novel, albeit one that doesn't stray radically from the winning formula of its predecessor. Once again, Harris takes the Reconstruction-era deep south as his setting, and African American characters, recently and tenuously liberated from slavery are the driving force of his narrative."
"Cut to 1860s New Orleans, where Coleman, a freed man in the wake of the Confederacy's dissolution, still works as a household servant to the Harper family, to whom he and his beloved elder sister June were given as a wedding gift when they were only children. The paterfamilias, Mr Wyatt Harper, aggrieved by his perceived loss of social privilege in postwar Louisiana, joins an expedition to Mexico in search of wealth and adventure that might soothe his bruised ego."
Set in 1860s New Orleans, the story follows Coleman, a freed man who continues to serve the Harper family alongside his elder sister June, whom the Harpers received as a wedding gift in childhood. Mr Wyatt Harper departs for Mexico seeking wealth and social restoration, taking June with him while Coleman remains with Mrs Harper and daughter Florence. Years later Mr Harper summons his family to join him; the Harper women naively prepare for frontier life while Coleman confronts separation, constrained agency, and the precariousness of freedom amid lingering racial hierarchy and postwar social upheaval.
#reconstruction-era-south #emancipation-and-freedom #racial-power-dynamics #family-separation #postwar-migration
Read at www.theguardian.com
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