Gothic literature (1)

Reading lists

A guide to Gothic literature

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Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don&rsquo;t seem to come close to explaining her

Song of Solomon&hellip;profoundly changed my life

The story of Milkman Dead and Guitar had me in thrall

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&rsquo;s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

Lured South by tales of buried treasure, Milkman embarks on an odyssey back home. 
 
As a boy, Milkman was raised beneath the shadow of a status-obsessed father. As a man, he trails in the fiery wake of a friend bent on racial revenge. Now comes Milkman&rsquo;s chance to uncover his own path. Along the way, he will lose more than he could have ever imagined. Yet in return, he will discover something far more valuable than gold: his past, his true self, his life-long dream of flight. 
 
&lsquo;A complex, wonderfully alive and imaginative story&rsquo; Daily Telegraph 
 
&lsquo;Song of Solomon&hellip;profoundly changed my life&rsquo; Marlon James 
 
INTRODUCED BY BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR MARLON JAMES 
 
**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**

Paradise

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

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

Morrison has brought it all together: the poetry, the emotion, the broad symbolic plan

Deeply serious and unexpectedly beautiful

Four young women are brutally attacked near an all-black town in rural Oklahoma. 
 
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 of the late 1970s, deftly manipulating past, present and future, this novel reveals the interior lives of its American citizens with astonishing clarity. It is through their eyes we see the clashes that have defined a nation. 
 
'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, Guardian 
 
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED 
 
**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**

Jazz

A tale of love, death, beauty, murder and obsession...told in a free-form syncopated prose so rhythmic that you can almost imagine Nina Simone singing it

Joe Trace &ndash; in his fifties, door-to-door salesman, erstwhile devoted husband &ndash; shoots dead his eighteen-year-old lover. 
 
At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life. 
 
'Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past.... Morrison's voice transcends colour and creed and she has become one of America's outstanding post-war writers' Guardian 
 
'She wrote about what was difficult and what was necessary and in doing so she unearthed for a generation of people a kind of redemption, a kind of relief' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New York Times 
 
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED 
 
**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**

The Bluest Eye

Beautiful and uncompromising… Essential reading and a novel that changes each time you return to it

Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. 
 
Unloved, unseen, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes. In this way she dreams of becoming beautiful, of becoming someone – like her white schoolfellows – worthy of care and attention. Immersing us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression Ohio, Toni Morrison’s indelible debut reveals the nightmare at the heart of Pecola’s yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfilment. 
 
**AS FEATURED IN ZENDAYA'S ESSENTIAL SUMMER READING LIST** 
 
**AS FEATURED IN OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB** 
 
 
'She revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon. She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. That's why she told her stories. And why we will never, ever stop reading them' Afua Hirsch 
 
'Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is rarest of pleasures' Washington Post 
 
'When she arrived, with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she immediately re-ordered the American literary landscape' Ben Okri 
 
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

Sula

'Extravagantly beautiful... Enormously, achingly alive... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter' New York Times 
 
As young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's secrets and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married. 
 
Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. Sula is a story of fear - the fear that traps us, justifying itself through perpetual myth and legend. Cast as a witch by the people who resent her strength, Sula is a woman of uncompromising power, a wayward force who challenges the smallness of a world that tries to hold her down. 
 
'What a force her thoughts have been and how grateful we must be that they were offered to us in this extremely challenging age' Alice Walker, Guardian 
 
**AS FEATURED IN OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB** 
 
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED 
 
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

Tar Baby

Deeply perceptive...Returns risk and mischief to the contemporary American novel

Toni Morrison's writing is a train that knows where it's going, fierce and fast-moving in narrative, lyrically showy in description

Toni Morrison has made herself into the D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche, transforming individuals into forces, idiosyncrasy into inevitability

It takes one to the sheer edge of human relationships

Arresting images, fierce intelligence, poetic language...One becomes entranced by Toni Morrison' s story

Mercurial imagination and brilliantly elegant prose-She has the ability to shock and entrance, episode by episode, which is the hallmark of a genuine writer

That rare commodity, a truly public novel... Morrison' s genius lies in her uncanny ability to immerse you totally in the world she creates

Wise, beautiful, astonishing, absolutely breathtaking

Powerful... A stunning performance... Morrison is one of the most exciting living American writers

Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine. Then there&rsquo;s Son. 
 
Jadine is sophisticated, beautiful, a black American graduate of the Sorbonne. Son is a black fugitive from small-town Florida who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between black and white people, masters and servants, and men and women. 
 
An unforgettable and transformative novel that explores race and gender with scorching insight from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved. 
 
**Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction** 
 
'Toni Morrison was a quintessential, unabashedly American writer. Like her fellow giant, Walt Whitman, her work was, above all, audacious. She seized the landscape with a flourish and wove it, unwove it and put it back together' Bonnie Greer, Guardian

THE ICONIC PULITZER PRIZE WINNING NOVEL

Beloved

A special edition of the award-winning classic

Challenging, troubling and ultimately rewarding in its treatment of the psychological and political legacies of racism

Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home, the farm where she was kept as a slave. 
 
Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, she is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, &lsquo;Beloved&rsquo;. A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison&rsquo;s enduring masterpiece and best-known work. 
 
&lsquo;Dazzling. . . Magical. . . An extraordinary work&rsquo; New York Times 
 
&lsquo;Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours&hellip; Beloved is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all&rsquo; Margaret Atwood 
 
&lsquo;An American masterpiece&rsquo; A. S. Byatt 
 
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE 
 
**One of the BBC&rsquo;s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Love

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.

VINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIES 
Spine-tingling, mind-altering and deliciously atmospheric, journey into the dark side of America with nine of its most uncanny classics. 
 
A haunting and affecting meditation on love from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved. 
 
May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L - all are women obsessed with Bill Cosey. He shapes their yearnings for a father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend. This audacious vision from a master storyteller on the nature of love - its appetite, its sublime possession, and its consuming dread - is rich in characters and dramatic events, and in its profound sensitivity to just how alive the past can be. Sensual, elegiac and unforgettable, Love ultimately comes full circle to that indelible, overwhelming first love that marks us forever. 
 
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction 
 
'Love is her best work...a slender but mesmerising tale' Evening Standard

Essays, Speeches, Meditations

Mouth Full of Blood

A vital new non-fiction collection from one of the most celebrated and revered writers of our time

A large, rich, heterogeneous book, and hallelujah... Mouth Full of Blood is a bracing reminder of what words do, how carefully they should and can be used… magnificent [and] rigorously argued

Morrison's voice rings out, bold and hopeful, welcoming us into a world where moral integrity reigns

Mouth Full of Blood demonstrate[s] the writer’s enduring eagerness to examine the contradictions of being both “native” and “alien” to her own country… She takes pride in challenging a traditional literary canon… at every stage, the reader is grateful for an author allowing, encouraging even, such intimate access to their work, thought and reflections

[Mouth Full of Blood] proves Morrison to be as astute and important an essayist as she is a novelist… These pieces are a wake-up call… [and] a brilliant insight into the mind and work of one of the world’s finest writers

Morrison’s fierce yearning for literature to be a more true and just realm over time, is a gift… [Mouth Full of Blood] is startling in its relevance to the conflicts and challenges of the present moment. In a time of turmoil and political greed, her writings have the power to bring, not a false comfort, but the hard-won belief that words can reshape the world. Toni Morrison’s own words certainly have

Intensely thought-provoking essays exploring themes of race, gender and globalisation… [Morrison’s] writing. Is just. Unparalleled, truly unparalleled… If anyone can write about this, it's Toni Morrison. It's powerful stuff. As you read it you find yourself circling every second sentence – everything is quotable. She truly is a master of language

Brace yourself for writing that is confrontational, unforgettable and exquisite… Not one word is either trivial or banal. Morrison’s thinking is as arresting and uncompromising as her politics… she has that unique and powerful quality, authority

A startlingly relevant collection that speaks to now

Morrison’s words possess a contemporary resonance, delivering unwavering truths with an intelligent rage that is almost equal to her hope

“She was our conscience. Our seer. Our truth-teller. She was a magician with language, who understood the power of words.” - Oprah Winfrey 
 
A vital non-fiction collection from one of the most celebrated and revered American writers 
 
Spanning four decades, these essays, speeches and meditations interrogate the world around us. They are concerned with race, gender and globalisation. The sweep of American history and the current state of politics. The duty of the press and the role of the artist. Throughout Mouth Full of Blood our search for truth, moral integrity and expertise is met by Toni Morrison with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence. 
 
The collection is structured in three parts and these are heart-stoppingly introduced by a prayer for the dead of 9/11, a meditation on Martin Luther King and a eulogy for James Baldwin. Morrison’s Nobel lecture, on the power of language, is accompanied by lectures to Amnesty International and the Newspaper Association of America. 
 
She speaks to graduating students and visitors to both the Louvre and America’s Black Holocaust Museum. She revisitsThe Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved; reassessing the novels that have become touchstones for generations of readers. 
 
Mouth Full of Blood is a powerful, erudite and essential gathering of ideas that speaks to us all. It celebrates Morrison’s extraordinary contribution to the literary world.

Vintage Minis

Race

Vintage Minis bring you the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human – from birth to death and everything in between

Imagine our joy when Vintage announced that it is publishing a collection of easily digestible books from the world’s most celebrated writers on the experiences that make us human… They look good and read well. That’s win/win in our book.

An exploration of race from one of the twentieth century’s primary chroniclers of the African American experience. 
 
Is who we are really only skin deep? In this searing, remonstrative book, Toni Morrison unravels race through the stories of those debased and dehumanised because of it. A young black girl longing for the blue eyes of white baby dolls spirals into inferiority and confusion. A friendship falls apart over a disputed memory. An ex-slave is haunted by a lonely, rebukeful ghost, bent on bringing their past home. Strange and unexpected, yet always stirring, Morrison’s writing on race sinks us deep into the heart and mind of our troubled humanity. 
 
 Includes selections from the books Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Beloved by Toni Morrison 
 
‘She gave me permission to be unapologetically Black. She informed me of the power that resided in me. She validated me when the world questioned my humanity’ Angie Thomas, author of The Hate U Give 
 
 VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. 
 
 A series of short books by the world’s greatest writers on the experiences that make us human 
 
 Also in the Vintage Minis series: 
 Sisters by Louisa May Alcott 
 Love by Jeanette Winterson 
 Babies by Anne Enright 
 Language by Xiaolu Guo

God Help the Child

The potent new novel from the Nobel Laureate

It is so beautifully written, full of perfect sentences…with such profound understanding of sympathy for her damaged characters… This is a wise, humane, enriching novel. If it should prove to be Toni Morrison’s last, it is quite a finale

Slim but powerful… A tale that is as forceful as it is affecting, as fierce as it is resonant

Morrison ... proves with God Help the Child that her writing is still as fresh, adventurous and vigorous as ever. ... Morrison’s characteristically deft temporal shifts and precisely honed language deliver literary riches galore. And which this novel is very readable, the pleasure is in working for its deeper rewards.

And the writing. Oh wow, the writing. Not for nothing has Morrison been garlanded with a Novel Prize, Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award. There’s always a sense of grand occasion when Morrison releases a book, and with good reason: the journey is always vivid, dazzling and rich, each paragraph a mealy morsel in its own right. A highly personal and affecting tale that manages to be deftly political, God Help the Child is emotionally rousing and gut-wrenching

A piece of mastery ... Sensitive to legacies of abuse, to pressures of racism, image, taboo and economics, and to the harmful fictions and common social madnesses of the modern Western world, it found an impossible-seeming, myth-like form to reveal the interconnections between these, never losing its streetwise footing in the process.

There is much to be admired: perspective, luminous language, and courage in confronting the difficulty of the big subject

A complex novel… It comes off beautifully, like a Picasso painting telling a story in a multi-dimensional series of superimposed snapshots as each character becomes ever more rounded and complete

True to style, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning Morrison uses simple yet poetic prose as she tackles timely issues in a timeless way

Raw and uncompromising… Moving but not for the faint-hearted

Morrison excels at bringing uncomfortable topics to the fore, weaving themes of family and the importance of how we treat our children together in an incredibly evocative, poignant and winning novel

The language, shifts in points of view and the audacity of the novel’s premise are overwhelming. Morrison remains an incredibly powerful writer who commands attention no matter the story she is telling

The themes here can be brutal…but the voices and fierce emotions will win your heart. Seductive or raging, bewildered or heartbroken, they are all, in the end hopeful

It is a testament to Morrison’s excellence as a writer that a book that is largely focused on the abuse of children is such compulsive reading

What a privilege and pleasure it is to read… The book hooked me from the first chapter… I recommend this book, as I would all the others by this author.

Toni Morrison’s fierce and provocative novel exposes the damage adults wreak on children, and how this echoes through the generations. 
 
 Sweetness wants to love her child, Bride, but she struggles to love her as a mother should. 
 
 Bride, now glamorous, grown up, ebony-black and panther-like, wants to love her man, Booker, but she finds herself betrayed by a moment in her past, a moment borne of a desperate burn for the love of her mother. Booker cannot fathom Bride’s depths, with his own love-lorn past bending him out of shape. Can they find a way through the damage wrought on their blameless childhood souls, to light and happiness, free from pain? 
 
 BY THE NOBEL-PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED 
 
‘Haunting. . . Moving. . . Fearless. . . . God Help the Child yet again proves that Toni Morrison is an icon’ Bustle 
 
 Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

Home

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

Frank Money returns from the Korean War to a segregated America that refuses him rest. 
 
When he learns that his sister Cee is in danger, Frank is forced to confront both the past he has tried to bury and the responsibility he has long avoided. 
 
As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his shattered sense of self, he unearths the courage he thought he'd lost forever. It is with incantatory power that Morrison's language reveals an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and, finally, his home. 
 
'No other writer in my lifetime, or perhaps ever, has married so completely an understanding of the structures of power with knowledge of the human heart' Kamila Shamsie, Guardian

A heartbreaking account of lost innocence and fractured dreams... Haunting

I read Toni Morrison's Home in one sitting and was moved to tears. It's a novella only in length: the deceptively straightforward narrative contains worlds

Morrison’s writing is so deft that even barely sketched characters leap off the page

Morrison excels at presenting a raw and moving portrait of fractured masculinity

Pulsing with imaginative energy… Home is a compact triumph

Beautifully, sparely written…lingers in the mind long after the final page is turned

Toni Morrison still has the power to shock and deliver hope

Each word resounds with sultry, heat-oppressive Georgia

Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.

Compelling...brief but intense...Morrison writes with her usual lyricism

It is beautifully, sparely written, as with all Morrison's work, and lingers in the mind long after the final page is turned

Spare and visual…a writer of consummate.

Pulsing with imaginative energy, it displays Morrison’s veteran ability to combine physical and social immediacy with psychological and emotional subtlety. A fine addition to Morrison’s expansive chronicling of black American history, Home is a compact triumph.

A highly fractured tale intended to resemble the crumbling nature of Money’s existence post war. Nothing is over-laboured. Each word resounds with sultry, heat-oppressive Georgia.

Morrison's writing is so deft that even barely sketched characters leap off the page

Home is a powerful reminder of the impact the past plays on the present

Morrison can say more in one word than most novelists manage in an entire book. Superb

Bursting with poetic language and horrific events this is a penetrating insight to the African-American experience

It is a powerful set-up, building suspense and a mounting sense of anxiety

Toni Morrison’s mesmerising prose manages to be both elegiac and visceral at the same time

A stirring exploration of war, race and belonging from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved. 
 
An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his shattered sense of self, he unearths the courage he thought he'd lost forever. It is with incantatory power that Morrison's language reveals an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and, finally, his home. 
 
'No other writer in my lifetime, or perhaps ever, has married so completely an understanding of the structures of power with knowledge of the human heart' Kamila Shamsie, Guardian 
 
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

A Mercy

Powerful, elemental... The issues Morrison explores go to the root of what humanity is. They could not be more important

Left me trembling at the sheer brilliance of its storytelling and the unassailable dignity of its purpose

So enthralling that you'll want to read it more than once

Varied and authoritative and frequently beautiful

An enduring, evocative read which carefully weaves fragmented, personal experiences into a layered, ambivalent narrative about slavery and the price of freedom

Morrison is at the very height of her powers

For all its restraint, and its sinister stealth, A Mercy is a furious novel, a volley of anger, contempt and sorrow... the rich and seemingly casual evocative accretion of background and narrative slowly tightens its grip until the reader is utterly in thrall

Emotions run deep and twisted in Morrison's fiction; and their outcome is superbly traced in this powerful, flawed and genuinely creative novel

A truly brilliant story that should be much better known

'A beautiful and important book' The Times 
 
 On the day that Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader, agrees to accept a slave in lieu of payment for a debt from a plantation owner, little Florens's life changes irrevocably. 
 
 With her keen intelligence and passion for wearing the cast-off shoes of her mistress, Florens has never blurred into the background and now at the age of eight she is uprooted from her family to begin a new life with a new master. She ends up part of Jacob's household, along with his wife Rebekka, Lina their Native American servant, and the enigmatic Sorrow who was rescued from a shipwreck. 
 
Together these women face the trials of their harsh environment as Jacob attempts to carve out a place for himself in the brutally unforgiving landscape of North America in the seventeenth century. 
 
‘Toni Morrison is the greatest chronicler of the American experience that we have ever known’ Tayari Jones, New York Times 
 
 BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED 
 
 Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O J Simpson Case

Birth Of A Nation-Hood

An incisive and thought-provoking collection of essays on a defining American experience, curated by the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved. 
 
 
Toni Morrison contributes an introduction and brings together thirteen essays, all written especially for this book, by distinguished academics - black and white, male and female - on one of the grimmest and most revealing moments of American history: the O J Simpson case. 
 
Together these keen analyses of a defining American moment cast a chilling gaze on the script and spectacle of the insidious tensions that rend American society, even as they ponder the proper historical, cultural, political, legal, psychological, and linguistic ramifications of the affair.

The novel powerfully portrays the meanings of what it means to be owned by another and the difficulty of owning oneself. Mythic in scope, Beloved is an attempt to grapple with the legacy of slavery. 
With a new introduction by A S Byatt

She's a masterful craftsperson, which people tend to overlook. She is as great and as innovative as Faulkner and Garcia Marquez and Woolf.

Mercurial imagination and brilliantly elegant prose...She has the ability to shock and entrance, episode by episode, which is the hallmark of a genuine writer

Toni Morrison (Author) 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. A S Byatt (Introducer) A.S. Byatt (1936-2023) was a novelist, short-story writer and critic of international renown. Her novels include Possession (winner of the Booker Prize 1990), the Frederica Quartet and The Children’s Book, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999, and was awarded the Erasmus Prize 2016 for her ‘inspiring contribution to life writing’ and the Pak Kyongni Prize 2017. In 2018 she received the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award.

It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. The worlds of Halle and Paul D. are to be destroyed in a cataclysm of torment and agony. The world of Sethe, however, is to turn from one of love to one of violence and death - the death of Sethe's baby daughter Beloved, whose name is the single word on the tombstone, who died at her mother's hands, and who will return to claim retribution.

The story of Macon 'Milkman' Dead, heir to the richest black family in a midwestern town, as he makes a voyage of rediscovery, travelling southwards geographically and inwards spirituality. Through the enlightenment of one man the novel recapitulates the history of slavery and liberation.

Toni Morrison

Zadie Smith

Recitatif is the only short story written by the powerhouse novelist . . . Morrison's sharp-eyed treatment of race, racism, and racial hierarchies remains relevant, digging deep into the marrow of society's maladies.

[A] stunning work . . . An illuminating introduction . . . The author's experiment pays off brilliantly, forcing the reader to consider racial stereotypes while also providing an indelible story.

The gravitas and unparalleled skill found in Morrison's best-known work is on full display in this compact powerhouse.

A uniquely interesting and enlightening reading experience.

This is the perfect text for a country still vigorously debating the relevance of race . . . The singular quality of this story makes it worthwhile, especially because the book contains a long, thoughtful introduction by Zadie Smith [which] provides a close reading and examines the way racial categories function in our allegedly post-racial culture.

This smart slippery tale... [is] highly relevant to our times... [Recitatif] serves as a challenge to contemporary novels that prefer to take refuge in racial orthodoxy than unsettle it, as Morrison so brilliantly does here

A compelling exploration of race and relationships

So thought-provoking you'll want everyone you know to read it

A stunning, timeless story about race, friendship, what keeps us apart and what drives us apart, from the one and only Toni Morrison, with an introduction by Zadie Smith. 
 
Twyla and Roberta met in a girls’ shelter as children. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only to meet again later at a diner, a grocery store and then on opposing sides of a protest. The two women are seemingly at opposite ends of every issue, but the persistence of their bond is undeniable. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.