Book: The Wedding Gift: An Explosive Story of Two Women Under Slavery

From Marlen Suyapa Bodden comes The Wedding Gift, a big novel of passion and self-destruction during the time of slavery.

A lawyer at The Legal Aid Society in New York City, the nation's oldest and largest law firm for the poor, Bodden brings her knowledge of human trafficking  and human rights abuses to play in this amazing novel.

Author Tom Wolfe says when you open it up, you'd better not have plans for the rest of your day.

The Story:

When Cornelius Allen gives his daughter Clarissa's hand in marriage, he presents her with a wedding gift: the young slave she grew up with, Sarah. Sarah is also Allen's daughter and Clarissa's sister, a product of his longtime relationship with his house slave, Emmeline. When Clarissa's husband suspects that their newborn son is illegitimate, Clarissa and Sarah are sent back to her parents, Cornelius and Theodora, in shame, setting in motion a series of events that will destroy this once powerful family.

Told through alternating viewpoints of Sarah and Theodora Allen, Cornelius' wife, The Wedding Gift is a stunning novel that shows where the complicated and compelling bonds and relationships between women explored in novels like The Help and The Secret Life of Bees began. It is an intimate portrait that shows where this particular American story and dynamic all started and will leave readers breathless.

Here's what Ebony magazine says about The Wedding Gift:

 "Once you read The Wedding Gift, you'll learn why the based-on-true-events story of biracial slave Sarah Campbell, her White sister Clarissa Allen and her slavemaster daddy Cornelius Allen is sure to become 2013's sleeper hit...the beauty of  this novel is the way it expands the typical slave narrative by adding gripping innuendo, mystery, surprise, shrewd insight and murder centered on people - White, Black, male and female - who will fight to the death to escape their circumstances."

 

St. Martin's Press  Hardcover  ISBN: 9781250026385   $25.99