Ours

Phillip B. Williams

From Shelf: Hardback adult fiction to look forward to this February

An epic, spellbinding novel of rebellion, redemption, power and humanity, and of a Black community finding freedom to live an ordinary life of love and pain in America's darkest days.

"A beautifully written and ambitious epic about the complexity of freedom. Williams crafts an expansive, original world filled with characters who linger long after the final page" Brit Bennett, author of The Vanishing Half In the mid-1800s, Saint, an enigmatic and powerful conjure woman, always flanked by a silent companion, travels the South annihilating plantations and liberating the enslaved by means of purposeful violence and powerful magic. She founds a town for those she has freed - and for them alone. They name the town Ours. Surrounded by an impenetrable magical border raised by Saint's powers, Ours is invisible to the outer world and sits blissfully away from prying eyes and violent hands. Saint's mission is to kill slavery - to scourge its damage from the minds of her charges and to keep them safe forever. Under Saint's watchful eye and away from the terrible weight of their enslavement, the townsfolk become neighbours, friends and lovers. They build each other's homes and care for each other's children. They love and grieve together. Then two mysterious strangers, Frances and Joy, appear, inexplicably crossing the invisible border from the outer world. And soon, Saint's lost past and fateful present begin to coalesce in ways that will either prove Ours' salvation or lay it bare to a world that would destroy it. Phillip B. Williams' astonishing debut novel is both a sweeping epic shot through with magic, and an intimate, elemental story about what it means to build a community and to try to build a life in the shadow of, and around the damage wrought by, slavery.