"Assured and arresting...You cannot put it down."" (Chicago
Tribune)
The House Girl, the historical fiction debut by Tara Conklin, is an
unforgettable story of love, history, and a search for justice, set in
modern-day New York and 1852 Virginia.
Two remarkable women, separated by more than a century, whose lives
unexpectedly intertwine . . .
2004: Lina Sparrow is an ambitious young lawyer working on a historic
class-action lawsuit seeking reparations for the descendants of American
slaves.
1852: Josephine is a seventeen-year-old house slave who tends to the
mistress of a Virginia tobacco farm--an aspiring artist named Lu Anne
Bell.
It is through her father, renowned artist Oscar Sparrow, that Lina
discovers a controversy rocking the art world: art historians now
suspect that the revered paintings of Lu Anne Bell, an antebellum artist
known for her humanizing portraits of the slaves who worked her Virginia
tobacco farm, were actually the work of her house slave, Josephine.
A descendant of Josephine's would be the perfect face for the
lawsuit--if Lina can find one. But nothing is known about Josephine's
fate following Lu Anne Bell's death in 1852. In piecing together
Josephine's story, Lina embarks on a journey that will lead her to
question her own life, including the full story of her mother's
mysterious death twenty years before.
Alternating between antebellum Virginia and modern-day New York, this
searing tale of art and history, love and secrets explores what it means
to repair a wrong, and asks whether truth can be more important than
justice. Featuring two remarkable, unforgettable heroines, Tara
Conklin's The House Girl is riveting and powerful, literary fiction at
its very best.
