God Help the Child

God Help the Child

Summary


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

Reviews

  • 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
    Allan Massie, Scotsman

About the author

Toni Morrison

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.
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