Arcadia

"Look at this girl. She was born on a farm not far from here, bred from a slave to be a slave. All she knows is work and the lash, and nothing else."

In the dark age of chaos and hunger that follows the destruction of technological civilisation, slavery has risen again.

Farmer Jack Hawkins considers himself a normal man, a decent and humane man. He works his slaves hard, in the fields and in harness to his cart, and flogs them when he thinks they need it. But he also gives them leisure time, even paying for them to enjoy visits to town, and he does not understand the public hostility against slavery that grows as society recovers from disaster.

Hearing of a new state, Arcadia, that has been built on slavery, Hawkins embarks on a journey to what he believes will be his paradise. Accompanied by the tough Norma, his former slave who carries the scars of his whip, he heads south, encountering many hazards along the way.

There, in the town of Arcadia and its territories, slavery is ferociously defended as the backbone of agricultural production. Just as ferociously, some of those who are owned as property are determined to fight back. Blood is repaid with blood as the anti-slavery resistance strikes back at slaveholders, replying to the whip and the branding iron with the bullet and the bomb. Slave and free alike pay with their lives for their beliefs, or simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Amid political scheming, a terrorist campaign, and savage repression, a dangerous love affair flares between the slave Christie, who was once Hawkins' fiancee, and the powerful Ellen Marshall who owns her. As Christie tries to keep her love alive and the skin on her back, out in the countryside farmers continue to work their slaves in the fields, even as some of those held in bondage plot the destruction of slavery and those who prosper from it.

Powerful, compelling, and often shocking, you will never forget Arcadia.