Paradise

by Toni Morrison

An all-Black town built paradise. Then attacked the women next door.

For you if

you want to understand how a community built to escape oppression can replicate it — and why that happens

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An all-Black town in Oklahoma, founded by families who were turned away from other Black towns for being too dark. They built paradise. Then they destroyed it. Morrison opens with an act of violence — men from the town attacking a nearby house of women — and moves backward and forward through time to show how a community built on the trauma of exclusion recreates that trauma on others. The most complex and the most rewarding Morrison novel after Beloved. A dispatch about what Black separatism built and what it cost, about the violence that communities inflict on the women who won't conform, about the paradise that turns on itself.

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