Publisher Description

Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our timesFour young women are brutally attacked in a convent near an all-black town in America in the mid-1970s. The inevitability of this attack, and the attempts to avert it, lie at the heart of Paradise.Spanning the birth of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the counter-culture and politics of the late 1970s, deftly manipulating past, present and future, this novel reveals the interior lives of the citizens of the town with astonishing clarity. Starkly evoking the clashes that have bedevilled the American century- between race and racelessness; religion and magic; promiscuity and fidelity; individuality and belonging.'When Morrison writes at her best, you can feel the workings of history through her prose' Hilary Mantel, Spectator'Morrison almost single-handedly took American fiction forward in the second half of the 20th century, to a place where it could finally embrace the subtleties and contradictions of the great stain of race which has blighted the republic since its inception' Caryl Phillips, GuardianBY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVEDWinner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

Notes

Paperback edition of Toni Morrison's acclaimed novel. At its heart, Paradise is the story of a brutal attack on four young women in a convent in the mid-1970s. But it is a tale that also examines race, religion, freedom and promiscuity. "Paradise is her most satisfying and most disturbing book to date, a smallish work of enormous philosophical dimensions, a meditation on the making and unmaking of communities" Scotland On Sunday.

Author Biography

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

Review

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don't seem to come close to explaining her * Guardian *
Morrison is an extraordinary novelist * New York Times *
We don't know quite how Toni Morrison does what she does, but we do know we are left shaken as readers and, to a profound degree, changed * Washington Post *
Morrison has brought it all together: the poetry, the emotion, the broad symbolic plan * New York Times Book Review *
It is a tour de force of writing * Independent on Sunday *

Promotional

Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times

Kirkus UK Review

This is as gripping and, at times, harrowing as any of Morrison's books and has been acclaimed by many as among her best. It concerns the stormy history of Ruby, an Oklahoma town set up by African-Americans for African-Americans, whose citizens are committed to the twin virtues of religion and self-help. The book's focal point is a brutal vigilante attack on a group of women who live in a former convent on the outskirts of the town. We then hear the individual stories of each of the women, and some of the townspeople. The women's stories especially make compelling reading: Seneca, abandoned as a child; Connie, a Portuguese street-child rescued by missionary nuns; Mavis, wrongly accused of murdering her twin babies; Gigi, in love with soft drugs and good times. Compassionate, violent and magical - this is essential reading. Shortlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize. (Kirkus UK)

Kirkus US Review

The violence men inflict on women and the painful irony of an "all-black town" whose citizens themselves become oppressors are the central themes of Morrison's rich, symphonic seventh novel (after Jazz, 1992, etc.). The story begins with a scene of Faulknerian intensity: In 1976, in rural Oklahoma, nine men from the nearby town of Ruby attack a former convent now occupied by women fleeing from abusive husbands or lovers, or otherwise unhappy pasts - "women who chose themselves for company," whose solidarity and solitude rebuke the male-dominated culture that now exacts its revenge. That sounds simplistic, but the novel isn't, because Morrison makes of it a many-layered mystery, interweaving the individual stories of these women with an amazingly compact social history of Ruby's "founding" families and their interrelationships over several decades. It all comes at us in fragments, and we gradually piece together the tale of black freedmen after the Civil War gradually acquiring land and power, taking pride in the culture they've built - vividly symbolized by a memorial called "the Oven," the site of a communal field kitchen into whose stone is etched the biblical command "Beware the Furrow of His Brow." That wrathful prophecy is fulfilled as the years pass, feuds between families and even a rivalry between twin brothers grow ever more dangerous, and in the wake of "the desolation that rose after King's murder," Ruby succumbs to militancy; a Black Power fist is painted on the Oven, and the handwriting is on the wall. With astonishing fluency, Morrison connects the histories of the Convent's insulted and injured women with that of the community they oppose but cannot escape. Only her very occasional resort to digressive (and accusatory) summary (e.g., "They think they have outfoxed the whiteman when in fact they imitate him") mars the pristine surface of an otherwise impeccably composed, deeply disturbing story. Not perfect - but a breathtaking, risk-taking major work that will have readers feverishly, and fearfully turning the pages. (Kirkus Reviews)

Prizes

Short-listed for International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2000
Short-listed for IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2000
Short-listed for Orange Prize 1999
Short-listed for Orange Prize for Fiction 1999

Review Text

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don't seem to come close to explaining her

Review Quote

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don't seem to come close to explaining her

Promotional "Headline"

Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved , Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times

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