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"Let us descend,' the poet now began, 'and enter this blind world.'" --Inferno, Dante Alighieri Let Us Descend is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing, replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver...

"Three Philippians whose lives were changed by Paul--a jailer, a formerly demon-posessed enslaved girl, and the woman referred to as Lydia--find their fates intertwined. In the face of great sacrifice, will they find the strength to do all that justice demands of them?"--

"From American master James Lee Burke comes a novel set in Civil War-era Louisiana as the South transforms and a brilliant cast of characters-enslaved and free women, plantation gentry, and battle-weary Confederate and Union soldiers-are caught in the maelstrom. In the fall of 1863, the Union Army is in control of the Mississippi River. Much of Louisiana, including New Orleans and Baton Rouge, is occupied. The Confederate Army is in disarray, corrupt...

"In 1846, a young surgeon, J. Marion Sims ("The Father of Gynecology"), began several years of experimental surgeries on a young enslaved woman known as Anarcha ("The Mother of Gynecology"). This series of procedures-performed without anesthesia and resulting in Anarcha's so-called "cure"-forever altered the path of women's health. Despite brutal practices and failed techniques, Sims proclaimed himself the curer of obstetric fistula, a horrific condition...