Lina Sparrow is a first-year associate at a lucrative Manhattan law firm who is given the difficult task of finding the perfect plaintiff to lead an historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves. An unexpected lead comes from her father, renowned artist Oscar Sparrow, who tells her of a controversy currently rocking the art world. Experts now suspect that the revered paintings of Lu Anne Bell, an antebellum artist known for her humanizing portraits of slaves on her pre-Civil War plantation, were actually the work of her house slave, Josephine. Lina knows that a descendant of Josephine's would be the perfect lead plaintiff for the lawsuit—if she is able to find one. But nothing seems to be known of Josephine's fate following the death of Lu Anne Bell in 1852. Searching for clues in historical archives, old letters, and plantation records, Lina slowly begins to piece together Josephine's story—a journey that leads her to question her own life, including the full story of her mother's mysterious death twenty years earlier. 

Alternating between antebellum Virginia and modern-day New York, and told through the very different eyes of Lina and the seventeen-year-old house girl Josephine, this is a searing tale of art and history, love and secrets. From the brutality of plantation life to the perils of the Underground Railroad, and from the corridors of a modern corporate law firm to the sleek galleries of the New York art world, The House Girl explores what it means to repair a wrong while asking whether the truth is sometimes more important than justice.*