Paradise

First edition. Large 8vo. Pp. [viii], 318, [5]. Black wove cloth stamped in copper-gilt to spine with author's initials to front; fore-edges untrimmed. Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson (priced $25.00 to front flap). A 400,000 copy first print run.

Signed by Morrison to title page.

A New York Times Notable Book, a Time Magazine Best Book of the Year, an Oprah Book Club Selection, and a Book-of-the-Month Club Main Selection for 1998. Shortlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize for Fiction. Author's seventh novel and her first since being awarded the Noble Prize for Literature in 1993.

"They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." Four young women are brutally attacked in a convent near an all-black town in mid-1970s Oklahoma, at the height of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War.

Morrison wanted to call the novel 'War' but was overridden by her editor, for fear of offending her fans. She explained: "I wanted to open with somebody's finger on the trigger, to close when it was pulled, and to have the whole novel exist in that moment of the decision to kill or not."

Being the last in Morrison's loose trilogy of novels on African-American history after Beloved (1987), and Jazz (1992). "With her new novel the Nobel laureate shows that she's the Great American Storyteller." –Time Magazine