Property is Valerie Martin's powerful, startling novel set in America's deep South in the early nineteenth century.

Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. She misses her family and longs for her native New Orleans, but most of all she longs to be free of her suffocating domestic situation. The tension revolves around Sarah, a slave girl given to Manon as a wedding present, whose young son Walter is living proof of where Manon's husband's inclinations lie. This private drama is played out against a brooding atmosphere of unrest and bloody uprisings, as the whispers of a slave rebellion grow louder and more threatening . . .