The Novel

From an Alabama Plantation Child to a Nobel laureate, one woman's life reminds us that individual choices can change the world.

What would you do if you discovered you had been given a second chance at life before you had been old enough to know it?

This is the story of a black child lovingly raised on a farm in the small village of St-Jean Chrysostôme in rural Québec who, through an insatiable curiosity and a strong intellect, removed the barriers to becoming a medical student, a physician, and eventually a scientist in Copenhagen, before finally being awarded the Nobel Prize.

Through four recorded conversations made near the end of her life, Joséphine Samuels recounts what it all meant.

Rather than asking what makes a person extraordinary, the novel asks a different question:

How does a life become meaningful?

At once intimate and sweeping, Joséphine Samuels is a literary novel about memory, the choices we make, and the people who unknowingly determine who we become.