The Invention of Wings

Handful's always been trouble. On her eleventh birthday, she is taken from the slave quarters she shares with her mother, wrapped in lavender ribbons, and presented to her owner's difficult daughter, Sarah, as a gift. Sarah knows that what she does next will unleash a world of trouble. She also knows that she cannot accept another person as a present. And so, indeed, the trouble begins ...

A powerful, sweeping novel, inspired by real events, and set in the American Deep South in the nineteenth century, The Invention of Wings evokes a world of shocking contrasts, of beauty and ugliness, of otherwise respectable people living daily with cruelty they fail to recognise; and celebrates the power of friendship and sisterhood against all the odds.