The Known World - Softcover

‘This remarkable novel, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and short-listed for the National Book Award, deserves all the acclaim it has won and then some, especially in this flawless rendition. Bears comparison with Trollope and Faulkner’ AudioFile

‘Heartbreaking....fascinating.’ Newsweek
‘Fascinating...poignant....[A] complex and fine novel.’ Baltimore Sun

‘The Known World is a great novel, one that may eventually be placed with the best of American Literature.’ San Diego Union-Tribune

‘Stunning....His first novel is...likely to win acclaim.’ New York Times

Masterful Pulitzer-prize winning literary epic about slavery, plantation life and our relationship to both, in the past and the present.

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, boot maker, and former slave becomes proprietor of his own plantation – as well as his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one another. Beyond the Townsend household, the known world also unravels: low-paid white patrollers stand watch as slave ‘speculators’ sell free black people into slavery, and rumours of slave rebellions set white families against slaves who have served them for years.
An ambitious, luminously written novel that ranges from the past to the present, The Known World seamlessly weaves the lives of the freed and the enslaved – and allows all of us a deeper understanding of the enduring multi-dimensional world created by the institution of slavery.