 This book also won the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger and a US National Endowment for the Arts grant.It tells the story of her grandfather, a white child sold as a slave right after the Civil War when the Emancipation Proclamation meant that African Americans could no longer be sold, and so many soldiers had died in the war that there were thousands of orphans.The psychological consequences of such a background—for the slave himself and for the generations that followed him—are the main concern of the novel.