The House Girl

In 1852 Virginia, Josephine is a seventeen-year-old enslaved girl who tends the household of Lu Anne Bell, a tobacco-farm mistress celebrated for her sympathetic portraits of the people her family holds in bondage. In 2004 New York, Lina Sparrow is a first-year associate assigned to a landmark reparations suit and needs a face for the case. Art historians have begun to argue that the paintings credited to Lu Anne Bell were really Josephine's work, which could make Josephine's descendants both plaintiffs and heirs to a valuable body of art. Piecing together Josephine's fate leads Lina back through her own family's silences. Conklin alternates the two women across the centuries, letting the attribution question anchor a story about credit, ownership, and what a country owes for what it took.