Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio.

Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterised her writing.

‘She revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon. She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. That’s why she told her stories. And why we will never, ever stop reading them’ Afua Hirsch

‘Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is rarest of pleasures’ Washington Post

‘When she arrived, with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she immediately re-ordered the American literary landscape’ Ben Okri

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

Discover Toni Morrison’s most iconic work in this Pulitzer-prize winning novel that exemplifies her powerful and important place in contemporary American literature.

‘An American masterpiece’ AS Byatt

It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love. Told with heart-stopping clarity, melding horror and beauty, Beloved is Toni Morrison’s enduring masterpiece.

‘Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours…“Beloved,” is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all’ Margaret Atwood, New York Times

‘The literary titan we must never stop learning from’ Metro

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

**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

An unforgettable and transformative novel that explores race and gender with scorching insight from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved.

Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine, a sophisticated graduate of the Sorbonne, art historian – a black American now living in Paris and Rome. Then there’s Son, a criminal on the run, uneducated, violent, contemptuous – a young American black of extreme beauty from small-town Florida. 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.

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

‘Toni Morrison was a quintessential, unabashedly American writer. Like her fellow giant, Walt Whitman, her work was, above all, audacious. She seized the landscape with a flourish and wove it, unwove it and put it back together’ Bonnie Greer, Guardian

'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

‘Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past.... Morrison's voice transcends colour and creed and she has become one of America's outstanding post-war writers’ Guardian


Joe Trace – in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband – shoots dead his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas.


At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life.

‘She wrote about what was difficult and what was necessary and in doing so she unearthed for a generation of people a kind of redemption, a kind of relief’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New York Times

BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED

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

“She was our conscience. Our seer. Our truth-teller. She was a magician with language, who understood the power of words.” - Oprah Winfrey

A vital non-fiction collection from one of the most celebrated and revered American writers

Spanning four decades, these essays, speeches and meditations interrogate the world around us. They are concerned with race, gender and globalisation. The sweep of American history and the current state of politics. The duty of the press and the role of the artist. Throughout Mouth Full of Blood our search for truth, moral integrity and expertise is met by Toni Morrison with controlled anger, elegance and literary excellence.

The collection is structured in three parts and these are heart-stoppingly introduced by a prayer for the dead of 9/11, a meditation on Martin Luther King and a eulogy for James Baldwin. Morrison’s Nobel lecture, on the power of language, is accompanied by lectures to Amnesty International and the Newspaper Association of America.

She speaks to graduating students and visitors to both the Louvre and America’s Black Holocaust Museum. She revisitsThe Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved; reassessing the novels that have become touchstones for generations of readers.

Mouth Full of Blood is a powerful, erudite and essential gathering of ideas that speaks to us all. It celebrates Morrison’s extraordinary contribution to the literary world.

‘Song of Solomon…profoundly changed my life’ Marlon James

Macon ‘Milkman’ Dead was born shortly after a neighbourhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly.

In 1930s America Macon learns about the tyranny of white society from his friend Guitar, though he is more concerned with escaping the familial tyranny of his own father. So while Guitar joins a terrorist group Macon goes home to the South, lured by tales of buried family treasure. But his odyssey back home and a deadly confrontation with Guitar leads to the discovery of something infinitely more valuable than gold: his past and the origins of his true self.
‘The story of Milkman Dead and Guitar had me in thrall’ Salman Rushdie, New York Times

BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED

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

A stirring exploration of war, race and belonging from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved.

An angry and self-loathing veteran of the Korean War, Frank Money finds himself back in racist America after enduring trauma on the front lines that left him with more than just physical scars. As Frank revisits the memories from childhood and the war that leave him questioning his shattered sense of self, he unearths the courage he thought he’d lost forever. It is with incantatory power that Morrison’s language reveals an apparently defeated man finding his manhood – and, finally, his home.

‘No other writer in my lifetime, or perhaps ever, has married so completely an understanding of the structures of power with knowledge of the human heart’ Kamila Shamsie, Guardian

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

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