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  • Published: 3 July 1998
  • ISBN: 9780099768418
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $26.00

Song of Solomon




Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times.


Song of Solomon…profoundly changed my life’ Marlon James

Macon ‘Milkman’ Dead was born shortly after a neighbourhood 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.

In 1930s America Macon learns about the tyranny of white society from his friend Guitar, though he is more concerned with escaping the familial tyranny of his own father. So while Guitar joins a terrorist group Macon goes home to the South, lured by tales of buried family treasure. But his odyssey back home and a deadly confrontation with Guitar leads to the discovery of something infinitely more valuable than gold: his past and the origins of his true self.
‘The story of Milkman Dead and Guitar had me in thrall’ Salman Rushdie, New York Times

BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED

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

  • Published: 3 July 1998
  • ISBN: 9780099768418
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 448
  • RRP: $26.00

About the author

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

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Praise for Song of Solomon

The poetry of the language. The vernacular and the rhythms of speech... It's eavesdropping on a slice of life. You care for every character. You love them, you bleed for them. It's a masterclass in narrative fiction. It's a book that not only makes me want to be a better writer, but a better person as well

Sarah Winman, Good Housekeeping

The language of Morrison's third novel astounds from its first pages to its triumphant conclusion... an epic of the African-American experience

Abdulrazak Gurnah, Week

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her

Guardian

A rhapsodic work... Intricate and inventive

New Yorker

Stunningly beautiful... Full of magnificent people... They are still haunting my house. I suspect they will be with me forever

Anne Tyler, Washington Post

A complex, wonderfully alive and imaginative story...glittering

Daily Telegraph

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon grips as a novel of extraordinary truth, wisdom and humour

Auberon Waugh, Evening Standard

Song of Solomon…profoundly changed my life

Marlon James, Guardian

Toni Morrison has written a brilliant prose tale that surveys nearly a century of American history as it impinges on a single family

New York Times Book Review

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon grips as a novel of extraordinary truth, wisdom and humour

Sunday Telegraph

A stunning novel that's steeped in black history

Marc Chacksfield, ShortList

The story of Milkman Dead and Guitar had me in thrall

Salman Rushdie, New York Times

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her

Guardian

A rhapsodic work... Intricate and inventive

New Yorker

Stunningly beautiful... Full of magnificent people... They are still haunting my house. I suspect they will be with me forever

Anne Tyler, Washington Post

A complex, wonderfully alive and imaginative story...glittering

Daily Telegraph

Song of Solomon…profoundly changed my life

Marlon James, Guardian