About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherPenguin Publishing Group

ISBN-100525429964

ISBN-139780525429968

eBay Product ID (ePID)215944015

Product Key Features

Book TitleThomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings : a Novel

Number of Pages624 Pages

LanguageEnglish

TopicLiterary, Biographical, Historical

Publication Year2016

IllustratorYes

GenreFiction

AuthorStephen O'connor

FormatHardcover

Dimensions

Item Height1.8 in

Item Weight29.8 Oz

Item Length9.3 in

Item Width6.2 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceTrade

LCCN2016-299027

ReviewsAdvance Praise for Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings "I don't think I've ever read anything quite like this novel. It's a story about love; it's a history of oppression; it's an American epic of Homeric proportions. Stephen O'Connor has brought into this work what I have long admired in his other writings--a wild imagination, a commitment to social and political concerns, and elegant, at times elegiac, prose. This is a tour de force."--Mary Morris "This is an extraordinary book. It imagines the most intimate aspects of slavery in the way only fiction can--everything is freshly shocking and freshly human. And its wildly original use of dreamscape, fabulism, and philosophy gives us the layers these characters deserve, as it reinvents the historical novel."--Joan Silber

Synopsis"Dazzling. . . The most revolutionary reimagining of Jefferson's life ever." -Ron Charles, Washington Post Winner of the Crook's Corner Book Prize Longlisted for the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A debut novel about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, in whose story the conflict between the American ideal of equality and the realities of slavery and racism played out in the most tragic of terms. Novels such as Toni Morrison's Beloved, The Known World by Edward P. Jones, James McBride's The Good Lord Bird and Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks are a part of a long tradition of American fiction that plumbs the moral and human costs of history in ways that nonfiction simply can't. Now Stephen O'Connor joins this company with a profoundly original exploration of the many ways that the institution of slavery warped the human soul, as seen through the story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. O'Connor's protagonists are rendered via scrupulously researched scenes of their lives in Paris and at Monticello that alternate with a harrowing memoir written by Hemings after Jefferson's death, as well as with dreamlike sequences in which Jefferson watches a movie about his life, Hemings fabricates an "invention" that becomes the whole world, and they run into each other "after an unimaginable length of time" on the New York City subway. O'Connor is unsparing in his rendition of the hypocrisy of the Founding Father and slaveholder who wrote "all men are created equal," while enabling Hemings to tell her story in a way history has not allowed her to. His important and beautifully written novel is a deep moral reckoning, a story about the search for justice, freedom and an ideal world--and about the survival of hope even in the midst of catastrophe.

LC Classification NumberPS3565.C65T48 2016