SSFPL Book Club - A Mercy by Toni Morrison
Next date: Tuesday, November 18, 2025 | 06:00 PM
to 07:00 PM
Please join us at 6 PM on Tuesday, November 18, in the 2nd-floor Community Room for a discussion of Mercy by Toni Morrison. South San Francisco Library Parks and Recreation Building, 901 Civic Campus Way.
SUBMIT BOOK CLUB TITLES FOR 2026
It's almost time to choose the new titles for 2026! Please forward your choices, either by replying to this email, or by letting me know in person at the November meeting. Votes will be cast at our December potluck.
ABOUT THE BOOK
In 1690, Anglo-Dutch trader Jacob Vaark sets off from New Amsterdam to collect a debt from a landowner in Maryland. Arriving at the plantation, Vaark discovers that the debtor cannot pay, and Vaark reluctantly decides to accept a young slave girl, Florens, as partial compensation. Taken from her baby brother and her mother, who thinks that giving up her daughter to a kinder slave owner is an act of mercy, Florens finds herself in the midst of a community of women striving to understand their burdens of sorrow and grief and to discover the mercies of love.
Much as she did in Paradise, Morrison hauntingly weaves the stories of these women into a colorful tale of loss, despair, hope, and love. Knitted together with Florens's own tale of her search to be reunited with her mother are the wrenching stories of Sorrow, a young woman who spent most of her time at sea before coming to Vaark's home; Lina, a Native American healer and storyteller who looks after Florens as a mother would a daughter; and Rebekka, Vaark's wife and Florens's mistress, who endures her own persecution, loss, and sorrow. Magical, mystical, and memorable, Morrison's poignant parable of mercies hidden and revealed belongs in every library.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Toni Morrison (1931-2019) was an American novelist, essayist, and editor who became one of the most influential voices in American literature. Born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, she grew up in a working-class family that instilled in her a deep appreciation for African American culture and storytelling traditions. After studying at Howard and Cornell Universities, she worked as an editor at Random House. Her novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, explored the African American experience with poetic language, unflinching honesty, and profound psychological depth, examining themes of identity, memory, trauma, and the enduring legacy of slavery.
Morrison received numerous honors throughout her career, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 for Beloved and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, becoming the first Black woman to receive the Nobel. Beyond her fiction, she was a distinguished professor at Princeton University and a powerful public intellectual whose essays and speeches addressed race, literature, and social justice.
When
-
Tuesday, November 18, 2025 | 06:00 PM
- 07:00 PM
Location
2nd Floor, Community Room
Library | Parks & Recreation Center, 901 Civic Campus Way, South San Francisco, 94080, View Map