NATIONAL BESTSELLER
A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtlety and grace.

In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different.

This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment. Here, Morrison’s writing is “so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry” (The New York Times).

About the Author

TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.