Sunday Synopsis: Wench and Beneath The Lion's Gaze

Last month, I was invited to New York for the Book Launch Party of Maaza Mengiste and Dolen Perkins-Valdez. I was unable to attend but I promised these debut authors I would celebrate with them on my blog. Of course, on the day of the launch I celebrated by purchasing these debuts, I was glad to find them in front of the bookstore down here in Georgia. 

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze tells a gripping story of family, of the bonds of love and friendship set in a time and place that has rarely been explored in fiction before.  It is a story about the lengths human beings will go in pursuit of freedom and the human price of a national revolution. Emotionally gripping, poetic and indelibly tragic, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze is a transcendent and powerful debut.







Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez is startling and original fiction that raises provocative questions of power and freedom, love and dependence. An enchanting and unforgettable novel based on little-known fact, Wench combines the narrative allure of Cane River by Lalita Tademy and the moral complexities of Edward P. Jones’s The Known World as it tells the story of four black enslaved women in the years preceding the Civil War. A stunning debut novel, Wench marks author Perkins-Valdez—previously a finalist for the 2009 Robert Olen Butler Short Fiction Prize—as a writer destined for greatness.