A breakthrough new work by Nalo Hopkinson, a homegrown award-winning Warner author who has consistently garnered tremendous acclaim. Best described as magical realism, Griffonne traces the birth and history of Ezili, the Afro-Caribbean goddess of sex and love, through the lives of women she inhabits throughout time. Three black slave women on a plantation in the Caribbean go one evening to bury a stillborn boy baby. Lost in their own thoughts, they begin to pray and sing. Their passion and their spirituality braid into a powerful calling, and a deity is born. Unaware of who she is, but able to ignore the limitations of time and place, this spirit rides in the heads of several women at once throughout history, searching for her strength and purpose and learning to influence the world. She visits France in the middle 1800s to inhabit the entertainer Jeanne Duval, Charles Baudelaire's black mistress, a deeply sensual woman with whom Baudelaire has a passionate, but ultimately dysfunctional affair. Around 300 CE, she rides Meritet of Egypt, a young Nubian prostitute on a trip to see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre near Jerusalem. After a miscarriage and a visitation by Ezili, Meritet will walk away from the desert into history as St. Mary of Egypt, patron saint of prostitutes and sailors. Finally, the spirit visits the island of St. Domingue, soon to be plunged into the revolutionary war which will make it Haiti, where the three women who called for the spirit struggle to maintain their connection to their old gods and simply live their lives, despite their brutal masters.

- Hopkinson made her debut with "Brown Girl in the Ring (Aspect, 1998), receiving the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Now, with a body of work that invokes comparison to such writers as Jamaica Kincaid and Edwidge Danticat, she is poised to claim her place in the mainstream spotlight.- "Skin Folk (Aspect 12/01), the author's previous book, won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, was named Recommended Fiction for 21102 by "Black Issues Book Review, and was named a "New York Times Best Book of the Year.- "Midnight Robber (Aspect, 2000), a "New York Times Recommended Book of Summer 2000, received Honorable Mention for the Casa de las Americas Prize, and was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novel, the Hugo Award, and the Philip K Dick Award.- The author's unique style of magical realism will attract the same audiences that catapulted Toni Morrison's "Beloved and Edwidge Danticat's "Breath, Eyes, Memory (Random House, 1998) to bestsellerdom.

"Whirling with witchcraft and sensuality, this latest novel by Hopkinson ("Skin Folk; Midnight Robber") is a globe-spanning, time-traveling spiritual odyssey."--"Publishers Weekly."

When three Caribbean slave women gather one night to bury a stillborn baby, their collected mournings braid into a powerful calling, and a deity is born. So begins the epic jouney of a spirit who defies the limitations of time and place to inhabit the minds of living women through history.