Mercy Mission

摘要

Toni morrison, winner of the 1993 Nobel prize in literature, returns to the issue of slavery in her new novel, her first in five years. Set in the late 1600s, before bonded labour became the cornerstone of American prosperity, "A Mercy" is a very different book to "Beloved", the novel which won Ms Morrison the Pulitzer prize in 1988 and made her name. "A Mercy" focuses on the stories of four women, each of them in servitude in a different way: Lina, a Native American servant who is traumatised by the decimation of her tribe; Sorrow, a disturbed survivor of a shipwreck; Florens, "a human child, not pieces of eight", given away by her mother in the hope of a better life (the "mercy" of the title); and Rebekka, their European mistress who, seeking a new life in the New World,rnmarries a man she has never met only to find herself gradually extinguished as one by one her children die.