"DAZZLING… MAGICAL… AN EXTRAORDINARY WORK!" -New York Times "BRILLIANT… RESONATES FROM PAST TO PRESENT." – San Francisco Chronicle "A MAGNIFICENT HEROINE… A GLORIOUS BOOK!" – Baltimore Sun "BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN… POWERFUL… TONI MORRISON HAS BECOME ONE OF AMERICA 'S FINEST NOVELISTS." -Cleveland Plain Dealer "THERE IS SOMETHING GREAT IN BELOVED: A PLAY OF HUMAN VOICES, CONSCIOUSLY EXALTED, PERVERSELY STRESSED, YET HOLDING TRUE. IT GETS YOU." – The New Yorker "A STUNNING BOOK… A LASTING ACHIEVEMENT!" -Christian Science Monitor "Magical… rich, provocative, extremely satisfying!" – Milwaukee Journal "Superb… a profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history… exquisitely told." -Cosmopolitan "Compelling… Morrison shakes that brilliant kaleidoscope of hers again, and the story of pain, endurance, poetry, and power she is born to tell comes out right." -Village Voice "In her most probing novel, Toni Morrison has demonstrated once again the stunning powers that place her in the first ranks of our living novelists." – St. Louis Post-Dispatch "Shattering emotional power and impact!" -New York Daily News "A book worth many rereadings." – Glamour "Astonishing… a triumph!"-New Woman "A work of genuine force… beautifully written." -Washington Post "Written with a force rarely seen in contemporary fiction… One feels deep admiration." -USA Today "Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure of our national literature."-New York Review of Books "Heart-wrenching… mesmerizing!" – Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Powerful is too tame a word to describe Toni Morrison's searing new novel." -Library Journal "Shatteringly eloquent."-Booklist "A rich, mythical novel… a triumph!"- St. Petersburg Times "Powerful… voluptuous!" – New York Magazine

The new novel from Nobel laureate Toni Morrison. Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child is a searing tale about the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult. At the center: a woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life; but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love until she told a lie that ruined the life of an innocent woman, a lie whose reverberations refuse to diminish. . Booker, the man Bride loves and loses, whose core of anger was born in the wake of the childhood murder of his beloved brother. . Rain, the mysterious white child, who finds in Bride the only person she can talk to about the abuse she's suffered at the hands of her prostitute mother. . and Sweetness, Bride's mother, who takes a lifetime to understand that "what you do to children matters. And they might never forget."

"They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." So begins this visionary work from a storyteller. Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Paradise opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage. In prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem, Toni Morrison challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation of race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present

Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself. Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear: You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question… And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it. There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is-yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye. This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another-physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. -James Marcus