Jazz

A great storyteller

Guardian

Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past, not in fiction today.... Morrison's voice transcends colour 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

As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem's jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear

Glamour

She may be the last classic American writer, squarely in the tradition of Poe, Melville, Twain and Faulkner

Newsweek

[A] masterpiece... She has moved from strength to strength until she has reached the distinction of being beyond comparison

Entertainment Weekly

A masterpiece... A sensuous, haunting story of various kinds of passion... Mesmerizing

Cosmopolitan

Thrillingly written...seductive... Some of the finest lyric passages ever written in a modern novel

Chicago Sun-Times

A compelling blend of heart and language... Resounds with passion

Boston Globe

She captures that almost indistinguishable mixture of the anxiety and rapture of expectation - that state of desire where sin is just another word for appetite

San Francisco Chronicle

Lyrically brooding... One accepts the characters of Jazz as generalized figures moving rhythmically in the narrator's mind

New York Times

She is the best writer in America. Jazz, for sure; but also Mozart

National Public Radio

Transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious

People

A tale of love, death, beauty, murder and obsession...told in a free-form syncopated prose so rhythmic that you can almost imagine Nina Simone singing it

James Runcie, Week