Jazz

Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times.'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' GuardianJoe 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 TimesBY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVEDWinner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

“A great storyteller”

"" Guardian "Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past, not in fiction today... Morrison's voice transcends colour and creed and she has become one of America's outstanding post-war writers... , her characters have amazing and terrible pasts - they must find them out, or be haunted by them" Guardian "Morrison's writing of a black romance pays its debt to blues music, the rhythms and the melancholy pleasures of which she has so magically transformed into a novel" London Review of Books "The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to black women" New York Times Book Review "Wonderful... A brilliant, daring novel... Every voice amazes" Chicago Tribune

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.

Joe Trace - In his fifties, door-to-door salesman of beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband - shoots to death his lover of three months, 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. Jazz is the story of a triangle of passion, jealousy, murder and redemption, of sex and spirituality, of slavery and liberation, country and city, of being male and female, African American, and above all being human.

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