Gabriel is a historical novel based on the life of a slave, Gabriel, and his two brothers, Martin and Solomon. They were the backbone of the largest and most well-organized slave insurrection ever uncovered in the United States. Yet this rebellion remains almost unknown, limited to footnotes or buried as an afterthought in history.
But an insurrection is only an event, a whisper of lives lived before and after. A generational saga, Gabriel is a story of the entangled lives of two families. The narrative unfolds primarily between 1776 to 1800 in and around Richmond, Virginia, a time and a place of major social transformation.
More than events, places, and history, Gabriel resurrects lives of struggle and triumph, tolerance and intolerance, acceptance and resistance. Moving beyond the footnotes, the novel explores love, indifference, and the jagged line between fate and choice. Gabriel is about children, mothers, fathers, slaves, those that owned them, and those that owned none, and freed men and women. In these pages, they breathe again.