The Bluest Eye is a fine book, a lament for all starved and stunted children everywhere Daily Telegraph Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is the rarest of pleasures Washington Post I imagine if our greatest American novelist, William Faulkner, were alive today he would herald Toni Morrison's emergence as a kindred spirit. So charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry New York Times Not only a story but an awe-inspiring poem that confronts beauty itself. Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction Read more 'When she arrived, with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she immediately re-ordered the American literary landscape' Ben Okri 'Discovering a writer like Toni Morrison is rarest of pleasures' Washington Post And why we will never, ever stop reading them' Afua Hirsch She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. 'She revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterised her writing. At once intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye shows how the past savagely defines the present. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times.

Toni morrison the bluest eye