Two half-sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations marked by wealth, slavery, war, coal mining, the Great Migration and the realities of 20th-century Harlem.

A sweeping and dramatic novel that spans 100 years and is set in Virginia during the Civil War and a century beyond explores the brutal legacy of violence and exploitation in American society as it examines the fates of the inhabitants of Beauvais Plantation and their descendants.