About the Book

‘Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in the tragic poetry of the past... Morrison's voice transcends color and creed and she has become one of America's outstanding post-war writers’ Guardian

Joe Trace – in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband – shoots dead his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas.

At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life.

‘She wrote about what was difficult and what was necessary and in doing so she unearthed for a generation of people a kind of redemption, a kind of relief’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New York Times

BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED

Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

Editorial Reviews

A great storyteller- Guardian

Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in a tragic poetry of the past, not in fiction today... Morrison's voice transcends color and creed and she has become one of America's outstanding post-war writers... A great storyteller, her characters have amazing and terrible pasts - they must find them out, or be haunted by them- Guardian

Morrison’s writing of a black romance pays its debt to blues music, the rhythms, and the melancholy pleasures of which she has so magically transformed into a novel- London Review of Books

The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to black women- New York Times Book Review

Wonderful... A brilliant, daring novel... Every voice amazes- Chicago Tribune

About the Author

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford) was an American author, editor, and professor who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature for being an author "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."

Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed African American characters; among the best known are her novels The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. In 2001 she was named one of "The 30 Most Powerful Women in America" by Ladies Home Journal.