Libertie – Inspired by the life of one of the first Black female doctors in the United States (Hardback)

Our summary description

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Libertie Sampson carries a name chosen in hope, not experience. Born free to a respected Black woman physician, she grows up protected, educated, and restless, shaped by a mother whose certainty about the future leaves little room for doubt or desire. Freedom, as it is offered to her, feels narrow and prescribed.

As Libertie edges beyond her close knit community, she begins to test the distance between independence and belonging. New places offer possibility but also constraint, revealing how ideals of progress can quietly replicate their own limits. What she wants is difficult to name, let alone claim, in a country still structured by the afterlife of slavery.

Libertie moves with patience and emotional clarity, attentive to the inheritance passed from parent to child, and to the quieter rebellions that take place within families. It is a novel about choosing how to live with history rather than escape it, and about the slow, uncertain work of shaping a self when even freedom arrives with conditions attached.