Product Description

Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. She misses her family and longs for the vibrant lifestyle of her native New Orleans, but most of all, she longs to be free of the suffocating domestic situation. The tension revolves around Sarah, a slave girl who may have been given to Manon as a wedding present from her aunt, whose young son Walter is living proof of where Manon's husband's inclinations lie. This private drama is being played out against a brooding atmosphere of slave unrest and bloody uprisings. And if the attacks reach Manon's house, no one can be sure which way Sarah will turn ...Beautifully written, Property is an intricately told tale of both individual stories and of a country in a time of change, where ownership is at once everything and nothing, and where belonging, by contrast, is all.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35453 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
* 'A wonderful novel, vivid, revealing' - Carol Shields * 'This fresh, unsentimental look at what slaveowning does to (and for) one's interior life must be a first. And the writing - so prised and clean-limbed - is a marvel.' - Toni Morrison 'Tightly constructed . deftly sustained . [a] subtly cadenced novel of racial and sexual trangressions' - Joyce Carol Oates, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

The Los Angeles Times
‘It’s a novel fraught with tension, desperation and rage, all masterfully sustained until the bitter conclusion`

The Times
‘ Perversely pleasurable`

Customer Reviews

ultimately trapped by the morals of her day
This book won the Orange prize for fiction and I can definitely see why. Set in the mid-1800s, it's the story of a girl from a "liberal" family in Southern America, who grew up amid a family who treated their slaves well. Married off to a man who is little more than a beast and also avails himself of slavegirls, she initially comes across as a model of modern morality. However a combination of sexual rivalry with one slavegirl in particular, and the constraints of the social conditions of her time take their toll with sad consequences. A gripping tale of how difficult it is to break away from social mores and a shockingly direct historical storyline make this one of the best books I've read this year. The characterisation of Manon Gaudet is very believable and yet impartial- she is portrayed as someone struggling to do her best in a time of incredible cruelty, and yet has human failings and jealousies too.

Compelling and disturbing
Despite hating the main character, the narrator, and hating her life, husband, beliefs, actions. speech - I found this book to be utterly compelling. Normally when you read a book and despise the character that the narration asks you to identify with; you can't go on, you have to stop reading, but Martin manages to keep you hooked. Whether you want to see the character come to a fateful end or not, you really stick with this book. It's remarkable and well worthy of the Orange Prize. Now there's something to make you buy - a book that actually deserves its reward! I immediately bought the rest of Martin's works after reading this - praise indeed!

A prize winning read
Having read a number of novels over the years concerning slavery, it came as a surprise to read one told from the slave-owner's viewpoint. We are witness to plantation life, set at a time of disease, falling sugar prices and slave uprisings. The narrator of "Property", Manon Gaudet, a 19th century Southern belle, with more than a touch of Scarlett O'Hara about her, is both 'property' and owner. This distinctly unlikeable 'heroine' is a product of her time, whilst hating and constantly rebelling against her own status as the property of her husband, a sadistic and perverted Louisiana planter, her view of slaves as something less than human is chilling. Valerie Martin has created a novel full of flawed, grotesque characters, whose voices, uncomfortably for the reader, seem to be speaking directly from the 19th century. I read that Martin describes this novel as 'a tour of hell with a guide who works for the management' which seems a perfect description from this reader's point of view. From the first clipped sentences, and on through its spare but perfectly written story "Property" is a novel which compels you to read quickly, but stays in your head long after you've finished.