The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
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 Okri
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
Product Details
About Toni Morrison
Reviews for The Bluest Eye
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