This won the orange prize in 2003. The novel is from the perspective of Manon Gaudet, a plantation owners wife. It is set in 1828 in Louisiana. It is rather brief and reads very easily, despite the horrors it describes. The book is in three parts; the build up to the slave revolt, the revolt and the aftermath.

Spoilers ahead

Manon is the daughter of a slave owner and her husband (who she hates). She describes the difficulties of her life with him; he has a child with one of the house slaves, Sara More...

The year is 1828


.....a sugar plantation in Louisiana, where Slavery is in flower for both the slaves and slave owners

The Slave Owners see “slave rebellions” around every corner..as they should, since their entire way of life is dependent on the labor of their “lowly blacks”.....and, our “heroine” Manon Gaudet, is no exception...though she is but the wife of a boorish “Massa”, Manon is not stupid...just crippled by her social status (she is “chattel” to her husband, as much as his slaves) and her More...

Finished in one day. Mesmerizing. There was some really uncomfortable material in this book, but I think I got a small glimpse of what it means to be thought of as "property". I have always thought that the slave owners/supporters called their slaves "brutes" or "savages" to make themselves feel better about what they were doing. I really thought it was all some hideous form of denial. But this book opened my eyes to the reality of this evil. These people genuinely thought, and lived by the theo More...

That America was built on the free labor of its slaves is common knowledge and many have heard the axiom , "Our possessions possess us" as well as "the sins of the fathers are vistited upon the heads of the children." It's hard to determine how many have considered what an institution such as slavery, in which Sarah, Midge, Delphine, and Walter are actual property, does to that "property" and to the owners. It appears both become intimate enemies, owner and slave entwined in an amoral system tha More...

I was livid at the end (or the last page) of this book. It was like it ended in the middle of the book! As I was heading toward the last 10 pages of this book, I kept wondering, "How is she going to finish this in 10 pages?". Well....she didn't. It just stopped. Nothing resolved. It is about the relationship of a slave and her owners. The character of the slave is never developed....at all. I suppose that the author wants you to read between the lines but I didn't get it. The book was well writt More...

Alright finally got to finish a book--yikes--I know not like me but my mind is constantly whirling with wedding miscellaneous (wedding planning really does make you crazy!)---- So I kinda wanted to ease back into my nightly reading routine so I chose a small book-finished it in two days with little less than two hundred pages so I may be back LOL, I heard of this so I requested from a neighboring library and I was pressed to read it and get me back in my reading groove..So finally a story about More...

I was intrigued by 'Property'. It's a book that, on the surface, seems destined to prepare you for a dramatic assault on your perceptions of slavery, but in the end leaves you feeling uneasy for quite different reasons.

Manon, the beautiful white wife of a sugar plantation manager, is unhappy and childless. She lives with the uncomfortable knowledge that her husband is in love with her negro maid, Sarah, and fathered two children by her. Although Sarah is not a 'free' woman, she is more 'free' th More...

A well-written, fast-paced, quickly read novel. Set in 1828 antebellum Louisiana, at the time when the sugarcane & cotton plantation economy & society were besieged by fantasies, rumors & justified fears of slave insurrection. There is nothing particularly new about this account, assuming one hasn't had one's head under a literary barrel for the past half-century. There is no happy ending, no endearing character. The steely-minded "heroine" Manon, is a white woman of modest means mar More...

A strangely disturbing & beautiful look at our twisted past...,

The characters in this novel are not really center, in my humble opinion. The story isn't even really central. The thing that this book holds at its core is a dramatization of the sickness in all of us; the glaring truth of the fact that everyone is self-centered and self-loathing at the same time.

The use of the harsh realities of slavery creates a discomfort that made me feel disjointed, not sure whom I should be feeling is the More...

Disturbing.

Discomfiting.

Dark.

Those are the first words that come to mind upon finishing "Property".

"Property" is not a story that I can say that I liked-there is nothing to like here.

Manon Gaudet is the wife of a plantation owner in 1828 Louisiana. Her marriage is irretrievably broken, both by her husband's actions and by her own choice. She is vain, arrogant, cold, and uncaring, judgmental in the extreme, and prone to extremism. She hates the plantation on which she lives, despises her husband, More...

The writing style was easily read and I got through it very quickly but it continuously annoyed me. In an interview Valerie Martin said she didn't want to "romanticise" slavery but, in my opinion, she has done exactly that. There can be ways of writing from a middle class white woman and still portray the brutality that was committed, but she did not do that one bit. The ending is also anti-climatic, it leaves you wondering why you even read the book. I only had to read this for my English class More...

Although well-written, and pleasingly unostentatious in style, this isn’t a book I could say I enjoyed. The narrator, Manon, is enduring a miserable marriage to an arrogant plantation owner in Louisana during the slavery years; she is certainly not lacking in physical courage, and is honest about her selfishness and coldness towards others, but generates very little sympathy because of this. The people in her social circle are equally shallow and self-serving. The black characters are not partic More...

"Property" is, in my experience, one of the rare page-turners that is not YA or fantasy/sci-fi. "Property" is set in antebellum Louisiana, on a sugar cane plantation. The protagonist and narrator is Manon Gaudet, the young wife of the plantation owner (whom she loathes). She and her husband are both fixated upon Sarah, a beautiful slave in their house who has born two children by her owner.

Manon can hardly be called a heroine, but she is both the best and worst thing about the book. She is a fa More...

I first heard of Valerie Martin when I came across a review of THE CONFESSION OF EDWARD DAY. I read it in a single gulp, and searched for other works by this author. PROPERTY is mesmerizing, disturbing, evocative and haunting. Although none of the characters is what I would describe as "sympathetic" each is compelling and the relationships among them illuminates the human ability to compartmentalize, dehumanize the "other," and generally perceive the world through the narrow porthole of self in More...

Valerie Martin's take on slavery is masterful. Toni Morrison calls it a "fresh, unsentimental look at what slavery does to (and for) one's interior life." Martin creates in Manon, an unsympathetic narrator who we (especially we women) sometimes sympathize with. As the isolated and neglected wife of an arrogant, brutish slave holder, she understands her oppression, her situation as her husband's property. At the same, racism blinds her to the plight of the slaves, especially to her personal maid, More...

This was a bookclub pick for October 2004. Since that was quite awhile ago, I don't remember a lot of details but do remember that it was a fast read that was somewhat refreshing because it was different. While I've read many books about slavery, this is the first one that has a white woman as a slaveowner who is also more or less a slave herself to her horrible husband.
Everything about the circumstances surrounding this novel is horrible; there is really nothing good that happens or that comes More...

This book was recommended to me for its focus on the dehumanization of whites under slavery. This is a very important topic, one that merits more study, and by that I mean not just of slaveholding families but of anyone who was not an abolitionist while this great crime against humanity was going on.

Martin's book won the Orange Prize for fiction. I read and grew more and more reluctant to read, though paradoxically found the reading to go more and more quickly. This was probably because of the More...

Shocking and disturbing, yet compulsive reading about the master slave relationship that took place in America’s Deep South in the early nineteenth century.
At the centre of the story is the narrator Manon Gaudet a New Orleans girl who is married to the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. When he was courting her she thought he was mysterious and his aloofness due to his sensitivity. However she was soon to discover that she was married to a hideous monster, we never learn the Christian name o More...

I very much enjoyed this book, which is odd as I found most of the characters particularly disagreeable and unpleasant.

It was interesting to find a book in the 'slave fiction' genre that was told from the perspective of the slave owner as it's become far more common to hear the 'voice' of the slaves themselves and this novel provided a good balance. It seems to be a snapshot of the collective consciousness of the times (1830's Louisiana). A time when slavery was simply the way of life and consi More...

Really disconcerting book, from the perspective of the wife of a plantation owner in early 19th Century America (herself a slave owner.) I picked it up after a review on Give the Feminist a Cigarette: http://feministcigarettes.blogspot.co..., which says a lot of the things I feel about it- an exploration of oppression, by men of women, but also by black by white, and the permutations thereof. That is, Manon Gaudet leads a life attached to an abusive, (both of herself and their ‘property’), negle More...

Valerie Martin taught creative writing at NMSU when I was a student there. My relationship with her was merely one of exchanging "hello" in the hallway of old Young Hall. Her students had only good things to say about both her teaching and her writing.

I find I also have only good things to say about her writing. While we can never go back in time and share in the inner workings of the human heart and mind of the slave owner, Property comes close. If plantation wives had ever dropped the mask of More...

This a short book that kept me up late finishing it, in spite of its infuriating narrator. She is the spoiled and self-centered wife of a cruel plantation holder, yet has only a little more freedom (and less gumption) than the slave who is both her maid and her husband's mistress. The fate of each of them is tied to the actions of the other at several crucial junctures and the book left me contemplating the use and abuse of power.

This book was winner of the Orange prize in 2003. If you like Doris Lessing's novel The Grass is Singing then you will like this. It is well written but an uncomfortable read. I could not empathise with any of the characters, not even Manon who I found to be very cold. Slavery is very much a part of southern American history and the book depicts the way white man treated his black slave, physical assault, verbal assault and rape or adultery. The conditions must have been poor that revolt and att More...

In a review [in NYR 8 Oct 2009:] of *The Confessions of Edward Day*, Margaret Atwood mentions this other book of Martin's that sounds interesting to me:

"*Property* is an astonishing take on the gruesome and emotionally incestuous lives led during the antebellum years of the American South, not only by the plantation slaves but by the white wives of the plantation owners, who were also considered 'property'... Most of Martin's novels have at least one character in them who is likable or charming More...

A brutally honest portrait of life on a slave plantation in the mid-19th Century. The narrator is a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a boorish, vicious plantation-owner. This facet of the story explores the reality of matrimonial subjugation, and our narrator’s plight does engender some sympathy, and the feminist struggle is one that the modern eye can immediately recognise. However, she is utterly incapable of applying the same logic of the unequal power dynamic between women and m More...

In 2008, the novel "Property" written by Valerie Martin, beat both Zadie Smith & Carol Shields (amongst others) to win the Orange Prize ...& after reading it, I can see why.

Another reviewer described "Property" as "watching a bad car accident" - you're appalled & disgusted & yet you can't look away. This is true too - simply because of the subject matter.

The story takes place in Louisiana during the 1820s. It depicts the life of Manon Gaudet, a wealthy white woman who is stuck i More...

It's the early nineteenth century in Louisiana and Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to the owner of a sugar plantation. Cut off from her friends and family, Manon increasingly begins to realise that she doesn't know or like the man she married. The slave girl she received as a wedding gift is a constant source of tension between husband and wife and the atmosphere Manon lives in is oppressive. There are rumours of a slave rebellion and as violence in the area increases, Manon's way of life is c More...