God Help the Child

 'What you do to children matters. And they might never forget'. Sweetness wants to love her child, Bride, but she struggles to love her as a mother should. Bride, now glamorous, grown up, ebony-black and panther-like, wants to love her man, Booker, but she finds herself betrayed by a moment in her past, a moment borne of a desperate burn for the love of her mother. Booker cannot fathom Bride's depths, with his own love-lorn past bending him out of shape. Can they find a way through the damage wrought on their blameless childhood souls, to light and happiness, free from pain? Toni Morrison's fierce and provocative new novel exposes the damage adults wreak on children, and how this echoes through the generations.

Review: "It is so beautifully written, full of perfect sentences...with such profound understanding of sympathy for her damaged characters... This is a wise, humane, enriching novel. If it should prove to be Toni Morrison's last, it is quite a finale" -- Allan Massie Scotsman "Slim but powerful... A tale that is as forceful as it is affecting, as fierce as it is resonant" -- Michiko Kakutani New York Times "Morrison ... proves with God Help the Child that her writing is still as fresh, adventurous and vigorous as ever. ... Morrison's characteristically deft temporal shifts and precisely honed language deliver literary riches galore. And which this novel is very readable, the pleasure is in working for its deeper rewards." -- Bernadine Evaristo Observer "And the writing. Oh wow, the writing. Not for nothing has Morrison been garlanded with a Novel Prize, Pulitzer and National Book Critics Circle Award. There's always a sense of grand occasion when Morrison releases a book, and with good reason: the journey is always vivid, dazzling and rich, each paragraph a mealy morsel in its own right. A highly personal and affecting tale that manages to be deftly political, God Help the Child is emotionally rousing and gut-wrenching" -- Tanya Sweeney Irish Independent "A piece of mastery ... Sensitive to legacies of abuse, to pressures of racism, image, taboo and economics, and to the harmful fictions and common social madnesses of the modern Western world, it found an impossible-seeming, myth-like form to reveal the interconnections between these, never losing its streetwise footing in the process." -- Ali Smith New Statesman, Books of the Year "There is much to be admired: perspective, luminous language, and courage in confronting the difficulty of the big subject" -- Razia Iqbal Independent "A complex novel... It comes off beautifully, like a Picasso painting telling a story in a multi-dimensional series of superimposed snapshots as each character becomes ever more rounded and complete" -- Susan Elkin Independent On Sunday "True to style, the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning Morrison uses simple yet poetic prose as she tackles timely issues in a timeless way" Big Issue in the North