Set during a slave rebellion in the days before the Civil War, PROPERTY is narrated by Manon Gaudet, a petulant and unhappy woman who runs a sugar plantation in Louisiana with her husband. Hopelessly innocent when she marries, Manon gradually realizes that her husband is a tyrannical slave-owner, and that he has forced a slave named Sarah to be his mistress and bear his children (something Manon fails to do). Gradually, after a slave revolt and its attendant disruption, Manon also becomes obsessed with Sarah--and is perhaps not that different from the brutal husband she struggled against. Valerie Martin's novel is a gripping exploration of the idea of "property," both in the legal sense as it was known in the days of slavery, and as an emotional condition.