Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

"A magnificent achievement...an American masterpiece" -- A.S. Byatt Guardian "A triumph" -- Margaret Atwood New York Times Book Review "She melds horror and beauty in a story that will disturb the mind forever" Sunday Times "Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature" New York Review of Books "A work of genuine force...Beautifully written" Washington Post