In this plain-spoken and lovingly detailed historical novel, the story of the Mayflower Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony is refracted through the prism of female characters. Despite the novel's quietness of telling, its currency is the human capacity for cruelty and subjugation, of pretty much everyone by pretty much everyone.

New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

I have been waiting for this book. But I'm not alone. There has been a sort of impatience and delicious anticipation felt by those waiting to be inside TaraShea Nesbit's much talked about Beheld.

Sarah Jessica Parker, via Instagram

A compelling exploration of friendship, character and the personal and political motivations that determine whose stories get told and whose voices are silenced.

Los Angeles Times, Books to Read to Study the Divided Nation

A compelling new novel by TaraShea Nesbit, author of The Wives of Los Alamos, explores not only the dangers the first colonists confronted on arrival, but those they brought with them … Beheld disrupts expectation to render the pulsing messy lives of those too often calcified in myth.

USA Today

There is a contradiction underpinning the whole project of English imperialism, and Nesbit flags it perfectly . . . The novel is most successful where it allows itself to stray from historical fact and plot--to invent and to play with language, to give itself imaginative time and space. Nesbit is brilliant in those moments, and captures a paradox of historical writing--that it's in the invention and improvisation that the past feels most pressing and most real.

New York Times

In a gripping retelling of the Plymouth colony's first murder, we finally hear the voices of women--and they speak an unvarnished truth that turns history on its pointy-hatted head. Truly a riveting read.

Helen Simonson, author of MAJOR PETTIGREW'S LAST STAND and THE SUMMER BEFORE THE WAR