Winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature.
"Not since her fellow Nobel Laureate William Faulkner has a writer populated a few acres with so much richness and desolation" Observer
"Paradise is structured around eight chapters, each bearing a woman's name, each adding a different point of view to the narrative. It's set in Ruby, a fictitious black town founded by proud, racially pure men who emerged from the fight against slavery only to find there was yet another hierarchy - this time based on gradations of skin colour - to keep them down. Yet the myth of Ruby's own racial genealogy, its piety and self-righteousness is fragile, and the women who skirt the town's boundaries, preferring to take refuge in their own company, threatens to blow it apart" Time Out
"In challenging complacencies and opening up new spaces in American narrative fiction, [Morrison] has no peer" Independent
"Paradise is the strangest and most original book that Morrison has written...It symbolically explodes one of the myths of race. And it is Morrison at her novelistic best" New Yorker