Toni Morrison

Beloved

Toni Morrison

• 1988 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 1987 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1987 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 22.38

At the center of Toni Morrison’s fifth novel is an almost unspeakable act of horror and heroism: a woman brutally kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be enslaved. The woman is Sethe, and the novel traces her journey from slavery to freedom during and immediately following the Civil War.

Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe’s past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and…

Paradise

Toni Morrison

• 2000 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
• 1999 Orange shortlist
• Score: 12.5

“Rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year’s Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what went on at the Oven these days was not to be believed…The proof they had been collecting since the terrible discovery in the spring could not be denied: the one thing…

Remember: The Journey to School Integration

Toni Morrison

• 2005 CS King-Author winner
• Score: 10.55

Remember is a unique pictorial and narrative journey that introduces children to a watershed period in American history and its relevance to us today.

Song of Solomon: A Novel

Toni Morrison

• 1977 NBCC–Fiction winner
• Score: 10.27

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, a novel of large beauty and power, creates a magical world out of four generations of black life in America, a world we enter on the day of the birth of Macon Dead, Jr. (known as Milkman), son of the richest black family in a mid-western town; the day on which the lonely insurance man, Robert Smith, poised in blue silk wings, attempts to fly from a steeple of the hospital, a black Icarus looking homeward…

We see Milkman growing up in his father’s money-haunted, death-haunted house with his silent sisters and strangely…