THE KNOWN WORLD by Edward P. Jones is a masterpiece of overlapping plot lines, time shifts, and heartbreaking details of life under slavery in Manchester County, Virginia, 20 years before the Civil War began.
Caldonia Townsend is an educated black slaveowner, the widow of a well-loved young farmer named Henry, whose parents had bought their own freedom, and then freed their son, only to watch him buy himself a slave as soon as he had saved enough money. Although a fair and gentle master by the standards of the day, Henry Townsend had learned from former master about the proper distance to keep from one's property. After his death, his slaves wonder if Caldonia will free them. When she fails to do so, but instead breaches the code that keeps them separate from her, a little piece of Manchester County begins to unravel. Impossible to rush through, The Known World is a complex, beautifully written novel with a large cast of characters.
Edward P. Jones, the New York Times bestselling author, has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for The Known World ; he also received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2004. His first collection of short stories, Lost in the City , won the PEN/Hemingway Award and was short-listed for the National Book Award. He has taught fiction writing at a range of universities, including Princeton. He lives in Washington, D.C.
January
2006
