Jazz
Toni Morrison
‘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’ Guardian
Joe 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 Times
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
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About Toni Morrison
Reviews for Jazz
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... A great storyteller, 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
As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem's jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear
Glamour
She may be the last classic American writer, squarely in the tradition of Poe, Melville, Twain and Faulkner
Newsweek
[A] masterpiece... She has moved from strength to strength until she has reached the distinction of being beyond comparison
Entertainment Weekly
A masterpiece... A sensuous, haunting story of various kinds of passion... Mesmerizing
Cosmopolitan
Thrillingly written...seductive... Some of the finest lyric passages ever written in a modern novel
Chicago Sun-Times