Amity: A Novel by Nathan HarrisPublication Date: September 2, 2025
Pages: 320
Add on: Goodreads
Buy the Book: Amazon
Rating: ★★★★
Source: From the Publisher
Genre: Fiction / Historical / 19th Century / American Civil War Era
Publisher: Little Brown and Company / Hachette Book Group
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Sweetness of Water comes a gripping story about a brother and sister, emancipated from slavery but still searching for true freedom, and their odyssey across the deserts of Mexico to escape a former master still intent on their bondage.
New Orleans, 1866. The Civil War might be over, but formerly enslaved Coleman and June have yet to find the freedom they’ve been promised. Two years ago, the siblings were separated when their old master, Mr. Harper, took June away to Mexico, where he hoped to escape the new reality of the postbellum South. Coleman stayed behind in Louisiana to serve the Harper family, clinging to the hope that one day June would return.
When an unexpected letter from Mr. Harper arrives, summoning Coleman to Mexico, Coleman thinks that finally his prayers have been answered. What Coleman cannot know is the tangled truth of June’s tribulations under Mr. Harper out on the frontier. And when disaster strikes Coleman’s journey, he is forced on the run with Mr. Harper's daughter, Florence. Together, they venture into the Mexican desert to find June, all the while evading two crooked brothers who'll stop at nothing to capture Coleman and Florence and collect the money they're owed. As Coleman and June separately navigate a perilous, parched landscape, the siblings learn quickly that freedom isn't always given—sometimes, it must be taken by force.
As in his New York Times bestselling debut The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris delves into the critical years of the Civil War’s aftermath to deliver an intimate and epic tale of what freedom means in a society still determined to return its Black citizens to bondage. Populated with unforgettable characters, Amity is a vital addition to the literature of emancipation.
REVIEW
Nathan Harris’s Amity picks up where the Civil War left off, at the messy crossroads of emancipation and reality. Coleman and June, siblings adrift in the promise and peril of Reconstruction, are searching not just for each other, but for what freedom actually means when the world around them refuses to change. Their journey sweeps through deserts and hostile borderlands, each step marked by risk and the memory of bondage. The threat of violence is never far, but it’s often the weight of longing and past trauma that looms largest.
Harris brings Coleman and June to life with a depth that feels lived-in, their resilience and anxieties woven into each encounter. Coleman’s need to find June propels the story, while June’s wary evolution in the face of false hope and uncertainty makes her unforgettable. Around them, Harris populates the narrative with townsfolk, wanderers, and outcasts who mirror the chaos and fragmentation of a country struggling to define itself beyond war. No one escapes unscathed.
What makes Amity stand out is its emotional urgency and refusal to romanticize history. Harris writes with a poetic touch, balancing the beauty of the land with the brutality of the lives lived upon it. The dialogue feels authentic, setting the story squarely in its time, but the questions these characters face, about family, belonging, and who gets to claim a future, ring out today.
In Amity, Harris treads familiar ground from his debut, The Sweetness of Water: the book doesn’t reinvent his formula. But what could feel repetitive instead feels like a deepening, a sharpening of the themes that define his work. The pacing lags here and there, and some readers might wish for new risks. Still, the payoff is in the atmosphere, a thick, richly drawn world where every interaction matters, and every choice is weighed against generations of loss.
By the final pages, Amity doesn’t offer easy answers, but it does leave an imprint, a testament to stories of survival and the silent costs of so-called progress. For anyone drawn to the tangled human aftermath of history, Harris’s novel is a beautifully wrought, immersive experience that lingers long after you put it down.
Four out of five stars.
