by Kevin Powers
First published 2020
Anthony Levallios owns Beauvais Plantation in Chesterfield County, Virginia, when the Civil War arrives. He sees that power in the new America will come from industry and capital, not tobacco fields worked by enslaved people. His world connects to others across more than a century. A wounded Confederate veteran struggles to understand the changed world around him. His daughter marries Levallois in what feels like captivity. Two enslaved people at Beauvais, Nurse and Rawls, fight impossible odds to stay together, but freedom may come too late for them. George Seldom lost his family in the war's chaos. In the 1950s, he watches the government tear down his Richmond neighborhood to build an interstate highway. Knowing his time grows short, he travels south with a young woman to find his origins and fill the empty space where his childhood should have been. The story follows that woman into middle age in the 1980s, where the same questions persist about living in a world built on others' suffering.
Genres: american-civil-war, american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century, 19th-century, american-history
Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Beauvais Plantation, Chesterfield County, Richmond, Virginia
Period: 1950s, 1980s, Civil War
273 pages · Kindle Edition · Little, Brown and Company
Content warnings: slavery, violence