Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0375713301, Paperback)

Valerie Martin’s Property delivers an eerily mesmerizing inquiry into slavery’s venomous effects on the owner and the owned. The year is 1828, the setting a Louisiana sugar plantation where Manon Gaudet, pretty, bitterly intelligent, and monstrously self-absorbed, seethes under the dominion of her boorish husband. In particular his relationship with her slave Sarah, who is both his victim and his mistress.
Exploring the permutations of Manon’s own obsession with Sarah against the backdrop of an impending slave rebellion, Property unfolds with the speed and menace of heat lightning, casting a startling light from the past upon the assumptions we still make about the powerful and powerful.

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0349117322, Paperback)

Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. She misses her family and longs for the vibrant lifestyle of her native New Orleans, but most of all, she longs to be free of the suffocating domestic situation. The tension revolves around Sarah, a slave girl who may have been given to Manon as a wedding present from her aunt, whose young son Walter is living proof of where Manon's husband's inclinations lie. This private drama is being played out against a brooding atmosphere of slave unrest and bloody uprisings. And if the attacks reach Manon's house, no one can be sure which way Sarah will turn ...Beautifully written, Property is an intricately told tale of both individual stories and of a country in a time of change, where ownership is at once everything and nothing, and where belonging, by contrast, is all.

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 038550408X, Hardcover)

From the acclaimed author of Mary Reilly, a groundbreaking novel that reexamines the questions of power and resistance, violence and sex, which inform all her work.

Set in the surreal heat of the antebellum South during a slave rebellion, PROPERTY takes the form of a dramatic monologue, bringing to the page a voice rarely heard in American fiction: the voice of a woman slave holder. Manon Gaudet is pretty and petulant, self-absorbed and bored. She has come to a sugar plantation north of New Orleans as a bride, bringing with her a prized piece of property, the young slave Sarah, only to see Sarah become her husband’s mistress and bear his child. As the whispers of a slave rebellion grow louder and more threatening, Manon speaks to us of her past and her present, her longings and dreams – an uncensored, pitch-perfect voice from the heart of moral darkness.

PROPERTY is riveting fiction, fast, richly plotted, shimmering with visual detail. It is also an invitation to re-examine the traditions of the Southern novel and the myth of the chivalrous South, and a haunting meditation on what Valerie Martin has called “the fantastic and constant perversity of the oppressor to feel victimized by the oppressed.”

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 000720776X, Paperback)

This is a practical, introductory guide covering everything you need to know about buying, selling or renting property. Full of easy-to-follow expert advice, this handbook will give even the most seasoned buyer, first-time buyer, landlord, and property developer the confidence to buy wisely and sell or rent profitably. Buying a house but trapped in a property chain? Gazumped, frustrated or just confused by the housing market? "Collins Need to Know - Property" demystifies the property market and provides advice on how to market a property, considerations to make when purchasing, up-to-date advice on the renting market and your obligations as a landlord, plus all the legal issues attached. "Property" is part of the highly successful "Collins Need to Know" series of reference books covering a wide range of popular subjects and diverse activities. Attractively designed, these handy, practical books give you detailed information in a concise and accessible way. The contents include: advice on how to market a property; considerations to make when purchasing; up-to-date advice on the renting market; legal issues; buying property for conversions or unusual properties such as house boats; and a wide range of sites on the World Wide Web where you can find help, advice and even that dream home.