Four young women are brutally attacked in a convent near an all-black town in America in the
mid-1970s. The inevitability of this attack and the attempts to avert it lie at the heart of
Paradise . Spanning the birth of the Civil Rights movement Vietnam the counter-culture and
politics of the late 1970s deftly manipulating past present and future this novel reveals
the interior lives of the citizens of the town with astonishing clarity. Starkly evoking the
clashes that have bedevilled the American century: between race and racelessness religion and
magic promiscuity and fidelity individuality and belonging. 'When Morrison writes at her
best you can feel the workings of history through her prose' Hilary Mantel Spectator
'Morrison almost single-handedly took American fiction forward in the second half of the 20th
century to a place where it could finally embrace the subtleties and contradictions of the
great stain of race which has blighted the republic since its inception' Caryl Phillips
Guardian BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED Winner of the PEN Saul Bellow
award for achievement in American fiction
