In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962, there are lines that are not crossed. With the civil rights movement exploding all around them, three women start a movement of their own, forever changing a town and the way women--black and white, mothers and daughters--view one another.

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...

"A magnum opus for our morally complex times from the author of Freedom. Young Pip Tyler doesn't know who she is. She knows that her real name is Purity, that she's saddled with $130,000 in student debt, that she's squatting with anarchists in Oakland, and that her relationship with her mother--her only family--is hazardous. But she doesn't have a clue who her father is, why her mother has always concealed her own real name, or how she can ever have...

Union nurse Georgeanna Woolsey travels with her sister to Gettysburg, where they cross paths with a slave-turned-army conscript and her cruel plantation mistress.