Paradise

"First, they shoot the white girl. They may take their time with the remainder." This marks the start of the storyteller's imaginative labor. Paradise, Toni Morrison's first book after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, begins with a horrific scene of mass murder and details how it began in a tiny, all-black community in rural Oklahoma.

The patriarchal society of Ruby, established by the offspring of liberated slaves and survivors fleeing a dangerous world, is based on morality, terror, and strict observance of moral rule. However, another group of exiles has assembled in a promised country of their own seventeen miles distant. Nine male Ruby residents will unleash their anguish, fear, and homicidal anger onto these ladies who are fleeing death and sorrow.

Toni Morrison confronts our most fervent beliefs as she combines history and folklore, memory and myth, into a remarkable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a distant past that is ever-present in writing that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem.