Jury Citation

“With meticulous yet seamless attention to historical detail, Linda Spalding transports the reader to 18th-century Virginia in her mesmerizing novel The Purchase. Cast out from his close-knit Pennsylvania community, the devout Quaker Daniel Dickinson travels west to strike a Faustian bargain: to live among slave owners in exchange for a prosperous new life for his young family. New to farming and blindsided by the brutal and all-encompassing economics of slavery, Daniel nonetheless does begin to prosper — at the expense of not just his own soul but those of his tragically compromised children. The Purchase is an epic novel in every way that matters — in scope, depth, and heart.” — 2012 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Jury (Lynn Coady, Esi Edugyan, and Drew Hayden Taylor)