In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.
BIO
Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.
REVIEWS
"The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to black women." --Edna O'Brien, The New York Times Book Review
"Thrillingly written . . . seductive. . . . Some of the finest lyric passages ever written in a modern novel." --Chicago Sun-Times
"She captures that almost indistinguishable mixture of the anxiety and rapture of expectation--that state of desire where sin is just another word for appetite." --San Francisco Chronicle
Vintage / June 08, 2004
0.64" H x 8.08" L x 5.16" W (0.59 lbs) 256 pages