First published in 1992, this novel, which follows the Pulitzer Prize-winning }Beloved{, is set in 1920s Harlem. The storylines focus on the ancestral history of a man and woman, and on the devastating consequences of the man's affair with a younger woman Joe Trace - in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband - shoots dead his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas. At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse.
