Sula - (Vintage International) by Toni Morrison (Paperback)

About the Book

Morrison's first novel, "The Bluest Eye" (1970), was acclaimed as the work of an important talent. "Sula" has the same power, the same beauty. At its center is a friendship between two women, a friendship whose intensity first sustains, then injures.

Book Synopsis

Sula and Nel are born in the Bottom--a small town at the top of a hill. Sula is wild, and daring; she does what she wants, while Nel is well-mannered, a mamma's girl with a questioning heart. Growing up they forge a bond stronger than anything, stronger even than the dark secret they have to bear. Strong enough, it seems, to last a lifetime--until, decades later, as the girls become women, Sula's anarchy leads to a betrayal that may be beyond forgiveness.

One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Masterful, richly textured, bittersweet, and vital, Sula is a modern masterpiece about love and kinship, about living in an America birthed from slavery. Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison gives life to characters who struggle with what society tells them to be, and the love they long for and crave as Black women. Most of all, they ask: When can we let go? What must we hold back? And just how much can be shared in a friendship?

Review Quotes

"Extravagantly beautiful. . . . Enormously, achingly alive. . . . A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter." --The New York Times

"Exemplary. . . . The essential mysteries of death and sex, friendship and poverty are expressed with rare economy." --Newsweek

"In characters like Sula, Toni Morrison's originality and power emerge." --The Nation

"Enchanting. . . . Powerful." --Chicago Daily News

"Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature." --The New York Review of Books

"Sula is one of the most beautifully written, sustained works of fiction I have read in some time. . . . [Morrison] is a major talent." --Elliot Anderson, Chicago Tribune

"As mournful as a spiritual and as angry as a clenched fist . . . written in language so pure and resonant that it makes you ache." --Playboy

"In the first ranks of our living novelists." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Toni Morrison's gifts are rare: the re-creation of the black experience in America with both artistry and authenticity." --Library Journal

"Should be read and passed around by book-lovers everywhere." --Los Angeles Free Press

About the Author

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.