I just finished reading Horse by Geraldine Brooks. I hadn't read anything else by the author and chose it almost at random from the available titles at the library. She does a remarkable job of combining the true history of the greatest race horse of the nineteenth century with her fictional tale of slavery and of racism then and now. While referencing physical abuse and family separations she brings home the truth of Frederick Douglas's explanation of the harm of slavery even under a "good" master. I have done a lot of reading set in the civil war era and found this to be probably (I really wasn't there) the best telling from an enslaved person's viewpoint I have seen.