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How many of these powerful Toni Morrison novels have you read?

TNN | Last updated on - Aug 6, 2019, 21:50 IST

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All of Toni Morrison's beautiful novels

The literary genius Toni Morrison (February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019) was a writer of the damaged and the damned. Morrison championed the cause of the black community, their hopes and dreams, trials and tribulations, their vigour and vitality. The Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner wrote 11 fantastic novels, each written with her superior linguistic fervour and heartfelt passion. Here we list down her iconic novels.

(Image: PBS.org)

2/12

The Bluest Eye

This heartbreaking and beautifully written novel follows the life of African-American Pecola Breedlove in her 30s, who develops a repulsion to her eyes and skin colour. The novel is great in its frank depiction of harrowing events of incestuous rape and hate crimes while speaking about a girl’s yearning for beauty, which is shaped by a White supremacist rule.
(image: Amazon)

3/12

Beloved

Set in the 19th century, the novel examines the tragic effects of slavery as an ex-slave woman Sethe is still haunted by her deeds and memories even 18 years after fleeing the plantation, while she becomes convinced that a young woman called ‘Beloved’ is her dead daughter returned to her.
(image: Amazon)

4/12

Sula

The novel follows the intertwined lives of two girls in the Black community, Nel and Sula, who come from opposite kinds of families and lead very different ways of life. The book talks about their turbulent friendship and the dynamics of the community, portraying the other characters extremely realistically as they struggle to make sense of the complex circumstances by imposing moral judgements.
(image: Amazon)

5/12

Song of Solomon

This book won Toni Morrison her Nobel Prize in literature. It chronicles the life of Macon ‘Milkman’ Dead III, a Black man and is full of ambiguous religious imagery and themes. The book is a poetic exploration of complicated questions regarding the pursuit of wealth and truth, and the tensions between freedom and slavery.
(image: Amazon)

6/12

Tar Baby

“Tar Baby” is a love story of Jadine and Son, two Black people from different backgrounds. While Jadine is a fashion model raised by wealthy Whites, Son is an impoverished fugitive, who embodies everything she loathes. As Morrison follows their affair, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.
(image: Amazon)

7/12

God Help the Child

The novel chronicles the life of a young woman by the name Bride, proud and in love with her black, beautiful skin. Her lighter-skinned parents dreaded Bride’s skin colour and refused to love her. Morrison weaves a beautiful tale of how childhood sufferings can damage the life of an adult and takes the reader to a fierce and provocative journey down to the bold and confident demeanour of Bride.
(image: Amazon)

8/12

Jazz

The novel explores Harlem, a new Black world, and is a revelation of vibrant music and lifestyle in 1926. It follows the Joe Trace and his wife Violet, who move into the new urban mecca, only to find their marriage in crumbles, and their dreams fade away as Joe falls in love with an 18-year-old girl.
(image: Amazon)

9/12

Paradise

Paradise opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in Ruby, an all-black town in Oklahoma. The novel follows the tensions between the men of Ruby, and a group of convent women. 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.
(image: Amazon)

10/12

A Mercy

“A Mercy” illustrates the harrowing beginnings of slavery during the seventeenth century, when America was still a new-born. Florens, a young slave girl abandoned by her mother, is on a quest for the love that her mother has withheld from her. A dark insight into the realities of slavery, this novel also delineates the complicated tensions between a mother and a daughter.
(image: Amazon)

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Love

This novel is about two women and the man that tore them apart. After his death, the two women living together in the man’s decaying mansion waiting for the other to die or to just get up and leave tells a haunting tale of loss and despair. But despite their coldness to one another, both women once had an undeniable bond before marriage while an unexpected adulthood changed them.
(image: Amazon)

12/12

Home

The novel is about Frank, an angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, comes back to racist America after enduring trench traumas. Frank is shocked out of disgust by the need to rescue his medically-abused younger sister and take her back to the small town of Georgia they come from, which he has hated all his life.
(image: Amazon)

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