BookBrowse Reviews Amity by Nathan Harris

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Nathan Harris's sophomore novel follows two siblings on their quest for true freedom after the end of the American Civil War.

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Nathan Harris's novel Amity is set just after the conclusion of the Civil War. Siblings June and Coleman were enslaved as children by the Harper family in Baton Rouge. They've now been emancipated, but having found themselves with nothing to their names and nowhere to go, they've opted to stay with the Harpers as servants, working for room and board. As the narrative opens, we learn the family patriarch, Wyatt Harper, has left for the Texas/Mexico border in the hopes of establishing a silver mine, forcing June to go with him, while the now nineteen-year-old Coleman has been left behind with Harper's wife and daughter; no one has heard from Harper and June in the two years since they departed. Turlow, a rough-looking stranger, arrives with a letter from Harper which Mrs. Harper chooses to interpret as her husband asking her to join him in Mexico. She, along with Coleman and her daughter, Florence, set off with Turlow, but Mrs. Harper has willfully misread the letter; June has left Harper, and Turlow's role is to transport just Coleman to Mexico to coerce June into returning.

Most of the story is narrated by Coleman as he recounts his ensuing misadventures along the journey. Self-educated and erudite, the young man has made it his mission to study deportment, which he uses to mask his insecurities:

"[I]n the elevation of my behavior I only strove to be a better version of a former individual I wished desperately to forget: a child that did not even have the privilege of knowing his parents; a boy who knew only of toil; a grown man so scared of his own freedom that he clung tightly to the chains that kept him in bondage."

Interspersed with his first-person account are shorter chapters relaying June's experiences as she travels across the desert in a wagon train with Harper. As the party approaches an army outpost near the Rio Grande, they meet a group of young Black Seminole men, led by the charismatic Isaac. June is immediately smitten by him, and over subsequent encounters he woos her with stories about his village, Amity. "I'd like a slice of this life you're going on about," she tells him, and Isaac gives her directions to the enclave, inviting her to join him there whenever she's ready. After the abusive Harper makes it clear he'll never allow her freedom, June waits for him to fall asleep and then simply leaves, beginning an arduous journey on foot across unmarked desert to find Isaac and Amity.

Harris's description of both the bleakness and the beauty of the desert is masterful, and June's narrative in particular captures the feel of the American Southwest:

"They encountered great cascades of nothingness…The heat would simmer and stoke to the point of cruelty and they would all wonder what god had been so needlessly provoked. Yet when it finally began to cool, the sky often took to a magnificent red hue that brought a wondrous spray of gold to the desert floor, epic striations of color that slashed through the few clouds present and left even the preacher amongst them speechless."

The novel is also superb historical fiction, and Harris portrays the uncertainty of the Reconstruction era in a way that suggests deep research into the time period. He also touches on Mexico's unsettled political landscape with just enough detail to satisfy readers but not so much that it bogs down the narrative pace.

What really makes the book a standout, though, is the author's character development. Both Coleman and June start out dependent on their former enslavers, but over the course of the novel they learn that they have agency. Their growth occurs so gradually that from chapter to chapter one might not notice, but by the book's end it's clear they aren't who they were when they left Louisiana. There's a marvelous complexity to these characters, too; each, for example, has a simmering rage that they can't acknowledge to themselves (let alone unleash on the white people around them), but this undercurrent of anger is palpable to the reader.

A few readers have criticized the book as slow, but I, for one, found it a page-turner. I suspect that may be because I reveled in Harris's lush descriptions even when the action was more subdued. June's story feels largely like a classic western, although its emphasis is on the desert as much as those who inhabit it. Coleman's tale feels more modern and contains several pulse-pounding scenes brimming with death and destruction, but not so many that one could call the novel a thriller.

I highly recommend Amity for most audiences, but those who appreciate historical fiction about the Reconstruction era, as well as westerns in general, will almost certainly enjoy it. Its unforgettable characters make it a winner, and its themes surrounding agency and responsibility ensure it's a great choice for book group discussions.

This review first ran in the September 10, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.