Original Sins: A Novel of Slavery & Freedom
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Why would a runaway Virginia slave—having built a rewarding life in the East Indies as a silk merchant—risk everything by returning to America in 1840, eighteen years after taking her freedom?
Anibaddh Lyngdoh claims that she intends to introduce a new kind of silk to the floundering American silk industry. But her true reason, as her old friend Grace MacDonald Pollocke discovers, is far more personal. Grace, now a Philadelphia portrait painter, undertakes a perilous investigation that leads to the discovery of old sins and crimes, and the commission of new ones. What laws may be broken—what sins and crimes committed—in the service of a higher justice? Deceit, forgery, fraud, perjury . . . even murder?
This novel thrillingly evokes a nineteenth-century America not so different from the present: a time of stunning new technologies and financial collapse, when religious and racial views collided with avowed principles of morality and law.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though the era of American slavery is widely viewed with repugnance today, it's easy to forget the vehemence and eloquence with which slaveholding was condemned by 19th-century abolitionists, portrayed richly, but haltingly, in this second novel from Kingman (Not Yet Drown'd). In 1840 Philadelphia, Grace MacDonald, a Scottish portrait painter married to an American, is surprised by the arrival of an old friend and former slave, Anibaddh Lyngdoh, who escaped to the East Indies nearly two decades before. Seeing her friend risk her freedom to resolve her unsettled past Anibaddh explains, cryptically, "I left something that I want to get" Grace feels "obligated to do anything, everything, to help." To that end, Grace heads to a Virginia plantation, ostensibly to paint portraits of the women who live there, while secretly unearthing the fate of those Anibaddh left behind. As Kingman pulls Grace through an exceedingly intricate plot, she subjects readers to lengthy discussions of real-life American painter and presidential portraitist Gilbert Stuart, daguerreotype techniques, and basic chemistry. Despite some inventive turns of phrase and melodramatic revelations, Kingman's latest loses momentum long before the big Philadelphia courthouse conclusion.
