Whose Are These?

Annapolis, 1734. In the records, Lem is a line on a merchant's list. In the Mercer kitchen he is a son, a brother, a boy who listens at the well and knows which floorboard creaks. His mother, Aissata, cooks for the household and is called Sarah by the people who own her. His grandmother Aisha, taken from Aissata when her daughter was small, does laundry next door and will not be warm to her. His father, Paul, comes home from the quarter smelling of wood shavings.

Then Paul is sent west, and Lem begins to carry.

A weight on his hip that doesn't belong to his baby sister. A sum that won't come right in Master Mercer's head. A stranger's lace cap, and the grief folded inside it. Every fragment is true. Lem misreads nearly every one.

When a kindness spoken aloud gets him called conjured, Lem is sent up the road to the Potomac frontier, to a father whose other life he has only felt in pieces, and a girl named Hasty whose weight he already knows.

Whose Are These is the first novel in a series about the inner lives the archive never recorded, and the threads between people that distance cannot cut.

Content note: this novel depicts slavery in colonial Maryland, including racial violence, the separation of families, and the death of an infant.