PRINCESS JOY L. PERRY
Princess Joy L. Perry is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship and a winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award. Her short stories have appeared in All About Skin, African American Review, and Kweli Journal. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia.
THIS HERE IS LOVE
W. W. Norton & Company — August 5, 2025
Three people―two enslaved, one indentured―live beside each other, fighting, and sometimes failing, to be more than their pasts say they should be.
1690s, Tidewater, Virginia. Bless, born into slavery and taken by her masters to toil in the house, faces her mother’s fury, learning that cruelty can come from any side. David, an enslaved child of a freed father, dreams of the promise of liberty made to him. Jack, an impoverished Scots-Irish boy, sails to America to be indentured but, in the hellish crossing, finds his hopes fracturing. Yet, somehow, they all will stake a claim to love.
Hurston-Wright Award winner Princess Joy L. Perry tells us a previously unheard story―one in which characters must carve out choices from the narrowest of circumstances and confront heartrending questions: How far would you go to protect your children from enslavement? How to create a lasting family after being torn from your own? What to value more: a hard-won opportunity or your humanity? This Here Is Love is an unforgettable story from an astonishing new voice.
Praise for This Here is Love
“In the manner of Edward P. Jones's The Known World, this sweeping and great-hearted novel presents a cast of unforgettable characters driven by their hopes and yearnings, men and women who in the face of the suffering and loss and violence of bondage manage to go about the ‘brave business of love.’ This is a beautiful book.” — Janet Peery, National Book Award Finalist for The River Beyond the World
"If there is comfort in chronicling the first century of the American Slavery project, it’s that it is written by one of its daughters. In This Here is Love, Princess Joy L. Perry refuses to shy away from the cruelties of surviving the realities of 17th century America and has charted the terrible truths of her character’s impossible choices―even as they map a journey towards their own freedom, their futures, their shared humanity. In these pages, we have love rooted and rebuilt in the land that stripped these compelling characters of almost all they have, and a blueprint for how hope may still move us forward." ― DéLana R.A. Dameron, author of Redwood Court, a Reese's Book Club Selection
"This Here is Love is an utterly riveting intergenerational saga of love, betrayal, theft and resilience. Princess Joy L. Perry laces every chapter with fireworks and unforgettable characters―all off-kilter, wounded and searching for solace in this epic tale of slavery and freedom." ― Lawrence Hill, author of Someone Knows My Name, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize
"A luscious storyteller, Perry brings to light the profound moral and emotional dilemmas her characters face, making the reader feel the weight of their impossible choices and everyday courage. A fierce and luminous debut." -― Sheri Reynolds, author of The Rapture of Canaan and The Tender Grave
“In the tenderest of prose and the most compelling of storytelling, Princess Perry has reached back centuries to our earliest national moments, writing of the confusion that occurs when power crosses love—but oh, how that love can survive! A love at the beginning and at the end. A love which is the sweetest human wisdom, the most merciful of legacies.” —Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois