Publisher Description

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 TimesAs 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, GuardianBY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVEDWinner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

Notes

The wildly different lives of two black women from Ohio reveal the tensions between small-town politics and individual character in a story told with the poetic intensity that only Toni Morrison can muster.

Back Cover

Sula and Nel are two young black girls; clever and poor, they grow up together sharing their secrets, dreams and happiness. Then Sula breaks free from their small-town community in the uplands of Ohio to roam the cities of America. When she returns ten years later much has changed, including Nel, who has a husband and three children. The friendship between the two women becomes strained and the whole town grows wary as Sula continues in her wayward, vagabond and uncompromising ways.

Author Biography

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.

Review

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 *

Promotional

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

Kirkus US Review

In a neighborhood where pain - "adult pain that rested somewhere under the eyelids" - is as pervasively omnipresent as the loveliness of May's green shade trees, death and its omens can be accepted as another face of God. But in the closed black community of the high hill overlooking a white Ohio town, there are two who stand outside the defensive webs of familial interdependence. There is mad Shadrach, victim of World War I, who defies death's capricious obscenity by ringing his bell for National Suicide Day every year - and one year he has some takers. And Sula, who will die, not like "other colored girls" rotting like a stump, but falling "like a redwood." For she is the product of a "household of throbbing disorder" and had learned isolation and the "meaningless of responsibility" early when she accidentally caused the drowning of a little boy. Intemperate, restless, Sula had some of the arrogance of her one-legged grandmother Eva. It was Eva who had long ago pondered the meaning of love when she used her only food (lard scrapings) to cure her baby boy's bellyache; yet when her son was a man, regressing to the womb of drugs, she burnt him to death. Sula also watched her mother die in flames, conscious only that she wanted the dying dance to go on. She left the village and returns to become the community's unifying evil - but will the people eventually love one who stood against the sky? Miss Morrison, author of The Bluest Eye (1970) in her deceptively gentle narrative, her dialogue that virtually speaks from the page, and her multilayered perceptions drawn through the needle's eye of any consciousness she creates, is undoubtedly a major and formidable talent, and this is an impressive second novel. (Kirkus Reviews)

Review Text

Stunning... Everything Morrison does is brilliant.

Review Quote

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

Promotional "Headline"

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

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