Pub Day Highlight: The Wedding Gift by Marlen Suyapa Bodden

HAPPY BOOK BIRTHDAY!!!!!

When prestigious plantation owner Cornelius Allen gives his daughter Clarissa’s hand in marriage, she takes with her a gift: Sarah—her slave and her half-sister.  Raised by an educated mother, Clarissa is not a proper southern belle she appears to be with ambitions of loving who she chooses and Sarah equally hides behind the façade of being a docile house slave as she plots to escape. Both women bring these tumultuous secrets and desires with them to their new home, igniting events that spiral into a tale beyond what you ever imagined possible and it will leave you enraptured until the very end.

Told through alternating viewpoints of Sarah and Theodora Allen, Cornelius’ wife, Marlen Suyapa Bodden's The Wedding Gift is an intimate portrait that will leave readers breathless.

Marlen Suyapa Bodden is a lawyer at The Legal Aid Society in New York City. She has more than two decades' experience representing poor people and low-wage and immigrant workers, many of whom are severely underpaid, if paid at all. 

She drew on her knowledge of modern and historical slavery, human trafficking, and human rights abuses to write The Wedding Gift, her first novel, which will be globally published on September 24, 2013 by St. Martin's Press.

Marlen is a graduate of New York University School of Law and Tufts University and has a Doctor of Laws (honorary) from the University of Rhode Island.