Beheld; Tarashea Nesbit

From the bestselling author of The Wives of Los Alamos comes the riveting story of a stranger’s arrival in the fledgling colony of Plymouth, Massachusetts―and a crime that shakes the divided community to its core.

Ten years after the Mayflower pilgrims arrived on rocky, unfamiliar soil, Plymouth is not the land its residents had imagined. Seemingly established on a dream of religious freedom, in reality the town is led by fervent puritans who prohibit the residents from living, trading, and worshipping as they choose. By the time an unfamiliar ship, bearing new colonists, appears on the horizon one summer morning, Anglican outsiders have had enough.

With gripping, immersive details and exquisite prose, TaraShea Nesbit reframes the story of the pilgrims in the previously unheard voices of two women of very different status and means. She evokes a vivid, ominous Plymouth, populated by famous and unknown characters alike, each with conflicting desires and questionable behavior.

Suspenseful and beautifully wrought, Beheld is about a murder and a trial, and the motivations―personal and political―that cause people to act in unsavory ways. It is also an intimate portrait of love, motherhood, and friendship that asks: Whose stories get told over time, who gets believed―and subsequently, who gets punished?

March 17, 2020

TaraShea Nesbit is the author of THE WIVES OF LOS ALAMOS and BEHELD. Her nonfiction, fiction, and critical essays have appeared in Granta, The Guardian, Salon, Fourth Genre, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of fiction and nonfiction at Miami University and lives in Oxford, Ohio with her family.

THE WIVES OF LOS ALAMOS was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, an Indies Introduce Debut Authors pick, the winner of two New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards, and received starred reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist.