Terrible, unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the farm where she lived as a slave for many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
B>b>A beautiful, arresting story about race and the relationships that shape us through life by the legendary Toni Morrison, in a stand-alone Knopf hardcover for the first time./b>/b>br>br>In this 1983 short story--the only short story Morrison ever wrote--we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other''s throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.br>;br>Another work of genius by this masterful writer, Recitatif keeps Twyla''s and Roberta''s races ambiguous throughout the story. Morrison herself described Recitatif, a story which will keep readers thinking and discussing for years to come, as "an experiment in the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial." We know that one is white and one is Black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage?br>;br>A remarkable look into what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, and how perceptions are made tangible by reality, Recitatif is a gift to readers in these changing times.
A New York Times Notable Book One of the Best Books of the Year: San Francisco Chronicle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kansas City Star At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Brides mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that what you do to children matters. And they might never forget. A fiery and provocative novel, God Help the Child--the first book by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment--weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult.
