ParadiseChatto & Windus, 1998 - 318 In Paradise - her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature - Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the book begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defence of "the one all-black town worth the pain", assault the nearby convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1980 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "out there ... where random and organised evil erupted when and where it chose". Richly imagined and elegantly composed, Paradise weaves a powerful mystery. |