Love: A Novel

Though slim in pages, Morrison constructs Love with a precision and elegance that shows her characters' flaws and fears with brutal accuracy. Love may be less complex than others in the grand Morrison oeuvre, but not because Morrison performs literary hand-holding. Readers will experience in this smooth, sharp-eyed gem another instance of the Toni Morrison craftsmanship: she enters your mind, hangs a tale or two there, and leaves just as quietly as she came. --E. Brooke Gilbert

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Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison’s spellbinding new novel is a Faulknerian symphony of passion and hatred, power and perversity, color and class that spans three generations of black women in a fading beach town.

In life, Bill Cosey enjoyed the affections of many women, who would do almost anything to gain his favor. In death his hold on them may be even stronger. Wife, daughter, granddaughter, employee, mistress: As Morrison’s protagonists stake their furious claim on Cosey’s memory and estate, using everything from intrigue to outright violence, she creates a work that is shrewd, funny, erotic, and heartwrenching.

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From the internationally acclaimed Nobel laureate comes a richly conceived novel that illuminates the full spectrum of desire.

May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida—even L: all women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the center of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces—a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.

This audacious vision of the nature of love—its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread—is rich in characters and striking scenes, and in its profound understanding of how alive the past can be. Love is a major addition to the canon of one of the world's literary masters.

"This is coast country, humid and God fearing, where female recklessness runs too deep for short shorts or thongs or cameras. But then or now, decent underwear or none, wild women never could hide their innocence—a kind of pitty-kitty hopefulness that their prince was on his way. Especially the tough ones with their box cutters and dirty language, or the glossy ones with two-seated cars and a pocketbook full of dope. Even the ones who wear scars like Presidential medals and stockings rolled at their ankles can't hide the sugar-child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside, between the ribs, say, or under the heart." —from Love

"It's a dense, dark star of a novel, seemingly eccentric, secretly shapely, and with Morrison writing at the top of her game."
   DAVID GATES, NEWSWEEK

"Haunting. In lyrical flashbacks, Morrison slowly, teasingly reveals the glories and horrors of the past. Morrison has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel."
   PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

"Love is a profound novel. As a vivid painter of human emotions, Morrison is without peer, her impressions rendered in an exquisitely metaphoric but comfortably open style."
   BRAD HOOPER, BOOKLIST (STARRED AND BOXED REVIEW)

"A gorgeous deployment of enigmatic flashbacks, Love is an elegantly shaped epic of infatuation, enslavement, and liberation: a rich and heartening return to Nobel-worthy form."
   KIRKUS REVIVEWS (STARRED REVIEW)

"Love seduces with Toni Morrison's signature lush prose and colorfully complex, textured scenes of human longing, suffering, and loss. She long ago claimed a place at the apex of American letters; her latest outing adds another darkly sparkling layer to that literary luster."
   ELLE (US)