Song of Solomon

By Toni Morrison

Categories: Literature & Fiction

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An official Oprah Winfrey’s “The Books That Help Me Through” selection • With this brilliantly imagined novel, the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. 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. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.

Recommended by 3 people

• Oprah Winfrey
• Michelle Obama
• Barack Obama: “I think Toni Morrison’s writings — particularly “Song of Solomon” is a book I think of when I imagine people going through hardship. That it’s not just pain, but there’s joy and glory and mystery.”