[Atria] From the national bestselling author of Rhett Butler’s People, the “exquisitely imagined, deeply researched” (Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of March) authorized prequel to Gone with the Wind following the epic story of one of literature’s greatest characters—Mammy—magnificently recounting her life from her infancy in Haiti and days as a slave in the South, to raising Scarlett at Tara and the outbreak of the Civil War. The only authorized prequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind—the unforgettable story of Mammy. On a Caribbean island consumed by the flames of revolution, an infant girl falls under the care of two French émigrés, Henri and Solange Fournier, who take the beautiful child they call Ruth to the bustling American city of Savannah. What follows is the sweeping tale of Ruth’s life as shaped first by her strong-willed mistress, and then by Solange’s daughter Ellen and Gerald O’Hara, the rough Irishman Ellen chooses to marry; the Butl