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  • Published: 5 March 1999
  • ISBN: 9780099768210
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $24.99

Paradise




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


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

  • Published: 5 March 1999
  • ISBN: 9780099768210
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $24.99

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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Praise for 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

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

Entrancing

Guardian

Deeply serious and unexpectedly beautiful

Harpers and Queen

Compassionate, violent and magical

Good Book Guide

It is a tour de force of writing

Independent on Sunday

Entrancing

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

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

New York Times Book Review