Synopses & Reviews
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
Review
"Lovely....A delight, full of lyrical variety and allusiveness....[An] exceptionally diverse novel." The Atlantic Monthly
Review
"Morrison dazzles....She creates a black community strangely unto itself yet never out of touch with the white world....With an ear as sharp as glass she has listened to the music of black talk and uses it as a palette knife to create black lives and to provide some of the best fictional dialogue around today." The Nation
Review
"It places Toni Morrison in the front rank of contemporary American writers. She has written a novel that will endure" The Washington Post
Review
"Stunningly beautiful....Full of magnificent people....They are still haunting my house. I suspect they will be with me forever." Anne Tyler, The Washington Post
Review
"A rich, full novel....It lifts us up [and] impresses itself upon us like a love affair." The New York Times Book Review
About the Author
Toni Morrison is the author of ten previous novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to Home (2012). She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She lives in New York.