Paradise

One of the most respected, and well-loved, American writers alive today, Morrison is also the most recent American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.Newly re-jacketed in stunning new backlist style to coincide with the paperback publication of God Help the ChildTotal sales of Morrison's books now at 774,000 across all editions, home and export. Vintage sales of Beloved have now reached over 385,000 copies. A Mercy sold over 75k copies to date.Recent BBC Imagine documentary on the life and work of Toni Morrison was watched by 1 million viewersHuge and dedicated fanbase: readers are so devoted that they cry at her public appearances and her fanbase includes Barack ObamaToni 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.

Four 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, Guardian

BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED

Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

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 herMorrison is an extraordinary novelistWe 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, changedMorrison has brought it all together: the poetry, the emotion, the broad symbolic planIt is a tour de force of writing