Sally Hemings

Bringing to life one of the greatest and most controversial love stories, this fictional account reveals the beautiful and elusive Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s mistress for 38 years whom he loved and lived with until he died. Adding to the scandal, she was a quadroon slave and Jefferson fathered a slave family whose descendants are alive today. In this novel, Jefferson and his mistress are fully realized, as are many of the other personages of the early Republic—Aaron Burr, Dolly and James Madison, John and Abigail Adams, and Sally’s mother Elizabeth, who was Jefferson’s father-in-law’s mistress. This brilliant and highly acclaimed novel is a contemporary masterpiece—a poignant, tragic, and unforgettable meditation on the history of race and sex in America.

"The relationship must have been much as the author depicts it in this fine first novel: a mixture of love and hate, of tenderness and cruelty and of freedom and bondage. The book is well researched, well written, insightful, and entertaining. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal

“[An] extremely affecting and poetic first novel. Even if historical fact and careful supposition were not the story’s basis, the Jefferson-Hemings relationship the novelist has imagined would be unforgettable.” —The New Republic

“A bold undertaking. The portrait of Jefferson is brilliantly imagined.” —Larry McMurtry, New York Magazine

“Chase-Riboud, an unusually gifted writer, has taken a stunning historical idea and made it sing with life. The characters and settings–the Hemings family and the Jefferson of Paris and Monticello–are vivid. Sally Hemings is a beautiful novel: the writing is eloquent, the story haunting.” —Grand Rapids Press

“Haunting . . . powerful and touching.” —The Denver Post

“Her novelistic abilities are impressive: she writes with grace and force, has an eye for detail and an ear for dialogue, a sense of scene and a capacity to create believable and interesting characters . . . Intelligently, even brilliantly imagined.” - The New Yorker

“Exquisitely crafted . . . a sensitive life study of a truly exceptional woman: complex, courageous, irresistibly attractive.” —Cosmopolitan

“The Thomas Jefferson–Sally Hemings legend is as deeply embedded in American mythology as John Henry. Barbara Chase-Riboud has captured all of the power, pain and ironic beauty which make the legend persist. It is a very moving and human novel.” —Nathan Huggins, author of Black Odyssey