On Sarah Grimke's eleventh birthday, she is given ownership of ten year old Handful, a Charleston slave, who is to be her handmaid. Follow their journey over the next thirty-five years as both strive for a life of their own, dramatically shaping each other's destinies and forming a complex relationship marked by guilt, defiance, estrangement and the uneasy ways of love. From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees, a magnificent novel about...

Inside the abbey of a Benedictine monastery on tiny Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion. Jessie Sullivan's conventional life has been "molded to the smallest space possible." So when she is called home to cope with her mother's startling and enigmatic act of violence, Jessie finds herself...