The Bluest Eye

Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times.Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio.Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterised her writing.'She revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon. She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. That's why she told her stories. And why we will never, ever stop reading them' Afua Hirsch'Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is rarest of pleasures' Washington Post'When she arrived, with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she immediately re-ordered the American literary landscape' Ben OkriWinner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

“Not only a story but an awe-inspiring poem that confronts beauty itself.”

Guardian
So charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry New York Times
I imagine if our greatest American novelist, William Faulkner, were alive today he would herald Toni Morrison's emergence as a kindred spirit... Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is the rarest of pleasures Washington Post
The Bluest Eye is a fine book, a lament for all starved and stunted children everywhere Daily Telegraph
Morrison's style rivets the reader...her synaesthetic, often rhythmic, even chanting prose recalls both Faulkner and Emily Dickinson The Times Literary Supplement
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
This story commands attention, for it contains one black girl's universe Newsweek
A profoundly successful work of fiction... Taut and understated, harsh in its detachment, sympathetic in its truth...it is an experience Detroit Free Press
I imagine if our greatest American novelist, William Faulkner, were alive today he would herald Toni Morrison's emergence as a kindred spirit... Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is the rarest of pleasures The Washington Post
Searing and haunting... [The Bluest Eye] is a unique piece of literature because it is both timeless and relevant -- Bernice McFadden, author of SUGAR Guardian

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.

'I imagine if our greatest American novelist William Faulkner were alive today he would hearld Toni Morrison's emergence as a kindred spirit...Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is the rarest of pleasures.' Washington Post 'The Bluest Eye is an enquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black: the wasting is done by a cultural engine that seems to have been designed to murder possibilites...And she does it with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.' New York Times 'The Bluest Eye is a fine book, a lament for all starved and stunted children everywhere.' Daily Telegraph 'Morrison's style rivets the reader...her synaesthetic, often rhythmic, even chaning prose recalls both Faulkner and Emily Dickinson. Times Literary Supplement

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