> Skip to content
  • Published: 3 July 1998
  • ISBN: 9780099760016
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $22.99

Sula




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


'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

BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED

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

  • Published: 3 July 1998
  • ISBN: 9780099760016
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $22.99

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.

Also by Toni Morrison

See all

Praise for Sula

Stunning… Everything Morrison does is brilliant.

Jill Dawson, Waitrose Weekend

Extravagantly beautiful... Enormously, achingly alive... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter

New York Times

Morrison explores the mythic power of femininity in a poor and isolated rural black community where women rule as mothers, warriors, witches and story-tellers... One of the most compelling writers at work today

The Times

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

In characters like Sula, Toni Morrison's originality and power emerge

The Nation

Sula is one of the most beautifully written, sustained works of fiction I have read in some time... [Morrison] is a major talent

Chicago Tribune

Full of beauty, eccentricity, bustle, laughter, sensuality, generous affection… Toni Morrison’s work is strikingly individual

Time Literary Supplement

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

New York Review of Books

Exemplary... The essential mysteries of death and sex, friendship and poverty are expressed with rare economy

Newsweek

Enchanting...Powerful

Chicago Daily News

As mournful as a spiritual and as angry as a clenched fist...written in language so pure and resonant that it makes you ache

Playboy

In the first ranks of our living novelists

St Louis Post Dispatch

Toni Morrison's gifts are rare: the re-creation of the black experience in America with both artistry and authenticity

Library Journal

Should be read and passed around by book-lovers everywhere

Los Angeles Free Press

Morrison explores the mythic power of femininity in a poor and isolated rural black community where women rule as mothers, warriors, witches and story-tellers... One of the most compelling writers at work today

The Times

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

In characters like Sula, Toni Morrison's originality and power emerge

The Nation

Sula is one of the most beautifully written, sustained works of fiction I have read in some time... [Morrison] is a major talent

Chicago Tribune

Full of beauty, eccentricity, bustle, laughter, sensuality, generous affection… Toni Morrison’s work is strikingly individual

Time Literary Supplement

Sula…profoundly changed my life

Marlon James, Guardian

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

New York Review of Books

Exemplary... The essential mysteries of death and sex, friendship and poverty are expressed with rare economy

Newsweek

Enchanting...Powerful

Chicago Daily News

As mournful as a spiritual and as angry as a clenched fist...written in language so pure and resonant that it makes you ache

Playboy

In the first ranks of our living novelists

St Louis Post Dispatch

Toni Morrison's gifts are rare: the re-creation of the black experience in America with both artistry and authenticity

Library Journal

Should be read and passed around by book-lovers everywhere

Los Angeles Free Press
penguin pop image
penguin pop image