In 1804, shortly before the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue is renamed Haiti, a group of women gather to bury a stillborn baby. Led by a lesbian healer and midwife named Mer, the women\u2019s lamentations inadvertently release the dead infant\u2019s \u201cunused vitality\u201d to draw Ezili\u2014the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sexual desire and love\u2014into the physical world.<\/span><\/p>\n

As Ezili explores her newfound powers, she travels across time and space to inhabit the midwife\u2019s body, as well as those of Jeanne\u2014a mixed-race dancer and the mistress of Charles Baudelaire living in 1880s Paris\u2014and Meritet, an enslaved Greek-Nubian prostitute in ancient Alexandria.<\/p>\n

Bound together by Ezili and \u201cthe salt road\u201d of their sweat, blood, and tears, the three women struggle against a hostile world, unaware of the goddess\u2019s presence in their lives. Despite her magic, Mer suffers as a slave on a sugar plantation until Ezili plants the seeds of uprising in her mind. Jeanne slowly succumbs to the ravages of age and syphilis when her lover is unable to escape his mother\u2019s control. And Meritet, inspired by Ezili, flees her enslavement and makes a pilgrimage to Egypt, where she becomes known as Saint Mary.<\/p>\n

With unapologetically sensual prose, Nalo Hopkinson, the Nebula Award\u2013winning author of Midnight Robber<\/i>, explores slavery through the lives of three historical women touched by a goddess in this \u201celectrifying bravura performance by one of our most important writers\u201d (Junot D\u00edaz).<\/p>\n

Representation Includes<\/h4>\n

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• Black and biracial queer\/sapphic women protagonists<\/li>\n
• One protagonist (Jeanne) has a chronic health condition caused by disease and a stroke<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
  Content Warnings<\/div>

  Slavery on plantations in the Caribbean; graphic violence, including a person skinned alive and another set on fire; racism, racist violence, and racist slurs; pregnancy from rape; stillbirth\/miscarriage; violence, oppression, and slave revolt;explicit sex scenes; sex work (a major character is sold into prostitution); abandonment in desert<\/div>