The Purchase

“Based in part on the author’s family history, Linda Spalding’s The Purchase is a compassionately told story of slavery and redemption, set in late 18^th century Virginia.

Daniel Dickinson, a Pennsylvania Quaker, has been cast out of his community for marrying a 15 year-old orphan girl after the death of his wife. En route to a new life in southern Virginia, he attends an auction with his family, where he makes a devastating purchase: intending to buy a plow, he buys instead a young slave boy called Onesimus. It is an act that goes against the very grain of his being, and its consequences will damage the lives of everyone around him.

I found myself mesmerized by this novel. From its earliest pages – from the very first sentence, even (“Daniel looked over at the daughter who sat where a wife should sit”) – one understands that this is a world kicked out of alignment, where relationships are twisted into unfamiliar shapes. Given such an opening, the essential longing of the novel cannot be anything but for a return to the natural order – an order that Daniel has been denied.

Daniel’s acquisition of the slave, an action rooted in confusion and error, takes on a darker significance in a faith-based world of fate and providence. That the mild-mannered Daniel is both a Quaker and a slave-owner forces us to question the gradual slide of evil: can an essentially decent person commit an act of wrongness and still hold to a moral path? Are rightness and righteousness necessarily linked? Can a wrong act lead to grace?

A staunch pacifist from an abolitionist faith, Daniel harbours no race prejudice and yet finds himself on the wrong side of one of the most racially repressive systems in the history of mankind. Of course, part of the power of Spalding’s elegant novel is that Daniel, historically, was not alone in his contradictions; nor is he alone in them today. For, like all historical fictions, this is a novel about who we are today, and how we chart what it is to be human today, rather than a story about a vanished time.

The Purchase gives face and voice to the complicated problem of individuals and power, whatever the century, and should be a caution to us all.”

Esi Edugyan’s second novel, Half Blood Blues, won the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize for Fiction, as well as the Ethel Wilson Award, the US Hurston-Wright Legacy Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Prize for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Women’s Prize, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Writing, the Governor-General’s Award, and the Rogers Writers Trust Prize.

Esi has read her work at festivals all over the world, from South Africa to China, and has attended residencies in Scotland, Iceland, Budapest, Germany, and Belgium. In 2014 she published her first nonfiction book, Dreaming of Elsewhere, a meditation on the relationship between home and belonging. She has taught in universities across Canada, and is at work on her next novel. She lives in British Columbia with her husband and two children.

Linda Spalding is an American-born Canadian fiction and nonfiction writer whose writing  often explores world cultures and the clash between contemporary life and traditional beliefs.

Her earlier books include the novels Mere (2001) co-authored with her daughter Esta Spalding; The Paper Wife (1996); Daughters of Captain Cook (1989); and the nonfiction book The Follow (1998), about renowned orangutan expert Birute Galdikas, one of the three female acolytes of anthropologist Louis Leakey known as “Leakey’s Angels” (along with Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey). It was short-listed for the Trillium Book Award and the Pearson Writers’ Trust Non-Fiction Prize.

Spalding is also well known for Who Named the Knife (2007), the true story of the murder trial of Maryann Acker, a teenager sentenced to life in prison for a murder committed while on she was on her honeymoon in Hawaii. Spalding, who served on the jury, tracks down Maryann 20 years later in order to re-examine the murder and the question of Maryann’s innocence. The book was made into a TV movie – Of Murder and Memory.

An editor of Brick, a Journal of Reviews, Spalding has been awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the Canadian literary community.

Linda lives in Toronto with her husband, Michael Ondaatje, her dog Jasper and her cat Jack.