Sula

Description: 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.

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