TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.
“Perhaps Morrison’s most lyrical performance so far.” —Christopher
Benfey, The New York Review of Books
“Morrison writes about psychological violence with an engineer’s
precision and a poet’s expansiveness.” —Tyrone Beason, The Seattle
Times
“Morrison packs a powerful narrative punch. . . . [Her] depiction
of the delightful ways black men engage in verbal banter to
exchange personal and collective memories, and the poignant ways
black women stand on their faith to deploy survival strategies only
they could design, makes this a novel that begs rereading. She
movingly describes people who survive and thrive, even when life
deals them painful, mean blows. . . . [T]he beauty of Morrison’s
language and her profound truths about life and living compel one
to run the page and keep reading. This 10th novel shows that the
author is still questioning what we think we know when we think we
know someone.” —Marilyn Sanders Mobley, Ms.
Magazine
“Home showcases a writer at the height of her powers in evoking a
moment and its historical counter-currents. And it ranks among
[Morrison’s] most readable stories. It is also, like so many of her
novels, a book certain to reward rereading: you can go Home again.
And you should.” —Jim Cullen, History News Network
“Gorgeous and intense, brutal yet heartwarming . . . like a
slingshot that wields the impact of a missile. . . . Home is as
accessible, tightly composed and visceral as anything Morrison has
written. . . . [Her] shorter, more direct sentences have the
capacity to leave a reader awestruck. . . . Devastating, deeply
humane, ever-relevant." —Heller McAlpin, NPR
“The story of the warrior’s struggle to return home is classic, but
Nobel laureate Morrison imbues her tale with twists that make
the journey more challenging and Frank Money’s success less
certain. . . . As usual, Morrison’s writing is both lyrical and
earthy and, although spare, dense with hints and meaning. This is a
book that can be read in one long sitting, and probably will be . .
. [A] satisfying, emotional . . . textured, painful and ultimately
uplifting story.” —Anne Neville, Buffalo News
“In this slim, scathing novel, Morrison brings us another
quintessentially American character struggling through another
shameful moment in our nation’s history. . . . Home is as much
prose poem as long-form fiction—a triumph for a beloved literary
icon who proves that her talents remain in full flower. Four
stars.” —Meredith Maran, People
“Beautifully wrought . . . [Home] packs considerable power, because
the Nobel Prize-winning author is still writing unflinchingly about
the most painful human experiences. There’s nothing small about the
story she’s told with such grace in these pages.” —Steve Yarbrough,
The Oregonian
“Short, swift, and luminescent . . . The music of Morrison’s
language, with its poetic oral qualities, its ability to be both
past and present in one long line, requires a robust structure, a
big space; a small auditorium simply does not suit it. Home, then,
is . . . a remarkable thing: proof that Morrison is at once
America’s most deliberate and flexible writer. She has almost
entirely retooled her style to tell a story that demands speed,
brevity, the threat of a looming curtain call.” —John
Freeman, The Boston Globe
“Part of Morrison’s longstanding greatness resides in her ability
to animate specific stories about the black experience and
simultaneously speak to all experience. It’s precisely by
committing unreservedly to the first that she’s able to transcend
the circumscribed audience it might imply. This work’s
accomplishment lies in its considerable capacity to make us feel
that we are each not only resident but co-owner of, and
collectively accountable for, this land we call home.” —Leah Hager
Cohen, The New York Times Book Review
“Powerful . . . Home, the latest novel by Toni Morrison, is almost
eerie in its timeliness. Set in the 1950s, it does not evoke the
martini and pinched waist nostalgia of Mad Men. Rather, it calls to
mind the plight of today’s veterans returning from the Iraq and
Afghanistan wars. . . . A hallmark of Morrison’s magic is the way
that her imagination engages critically with several subjects
simultaneously, but Home is particularly intriguing because it also
seems to be a reflection on the author’s previous works. . . . .
The writing reads like a love letter to a generation that took the
English language, lubricated its syntax and bent meanings as the
situation required. . . . The result is not poetry, exactly, yet
the characters communicate in such a way that there are subtle
metaphors in every exchange. The events of this narrative are
striking and arresting in the manner that one expects from
Morrison, the only living American Nobel laureate in literature.
Family secrets are revealed, brutal truths about the history of
race in America are displayed without sentimentality or animus. As
always, Morrison’s prose is immaculate, jaw-dropping in its beauty
and audacity. . . . In addition to her reputation for gorgeous
sentences, Morrison is known for a certain brutality in her
plotting, and this wrenching novel is no exception. But Home also
brims with affection and optimism. The gains here are hard won, but
honestly earned, and sweet as love.” —Tayari Jones, San Francisco
Chronicle
“Morrison writes without airs. In Home, even the most painful and
devastating moments are told head-on, not prettified to make them
more palatable [or] heightened to create a stronger impression. She
builds trust with the reader at every step; the events may be
imagined, but Morrison is speaking her truth, and we believe her.
Here, as in her previous books, Morrison’s characters carry their
histories heavy on their backs, a burden that defines them and
influences everything they do today. The past, she says repeatedly,
is always with us. It can’t be ignored or shunted aside because to
be truly home in the present, we must confront the past.” —Amy
Driscoll, The Miami Herald
“[Home] is compact, a novella really, and filled with Morrison’s
signature style—clear, razor-sharp, poetic writing and layered
storytelling. . . . This story isn’t about taking responsibility
for others. It is a tale about taking responsibility for yourself.
. . . The journey home, then, is not to a physical place. It is an
internal destination that each of us must find.” —Karen M. Thomas,
The Dallas Morning News
“If you are familiar with Toni Morrison’s work (who isn’t?), you
will want to read her new novella, Home, in one sitting. It will
take only two or three hours, and that one sitting will help you
keep in mind the story’s beautiful symmetry. Home is a reverse
journey, a return to an earlier place, a going back instead of
forward—at least physically—though it can just as easily be argued
that the protagonist (Frank Money) advances as much as he retreats.
And that metaphor of advancing is especially suitable, given the
fact that Frank has recently returned from the war in Korea. He’s
been traumatized by horrific events but is equally unsettled when
he realizes that he’s returned to the same racist country he left
before he departed to fight for America. . . . Above all, Home
demonstrates a sense of community, not just within the physical
environment of one’s origins but also with the assistance that
total strangers offer Frank Money. The poorest people in the
country extend a hand, share, and rehabilitate others when
necessary. These values are shown to be so redemptive that they
cancel out what many people believe to be natural instincts of
revenge, of payback, of an eye-for-an-eye and a tooth-for-a-tooth.
. . . Home is an engaging narrative, full of surprises and
profundities.” —Charles R. Larson, Counterpunch
“This haunting, slender novel is a kind of tiny Rosetta Stone to
Toni Morrison’s entire oeuvre. Home encapsulates all the themes
that have fueled her fiction: . . . the hold that time past exerts
over time present, the hazards of love (and its link to leaving and
loss), the possibility of redemption and transcendence. Once again
we are introduced to characters who must choose between the
suffocating but sustaining ethos of small-town life and the
temptations and pitfalls of the wider world. Once again we are made
to see the costs and consolations of caring too much—for a family
member, a lover or a friend. . . . Whereas Beloved mythologized its
characters’ stories, lending their experiences the resonance of a
symphony or an opera, Home is a lower-key chamber piece, pitched
somewhere between straight-up naturalism and the world of fable. In
these pages Morrison eschews the fierce Faulknerian prose and
García Márquez-like flights of surrealism that animated some of her
earlier novels, adopting a new, pared-down style that enables her
to map the day-to-day lives of her characters with lyrical
precision. . . . Morrison has found a new, angular voice and
straight-ahead storytelling style that showcase her knowledge of
her characters, and the ways in which violence and passion and
regret are braided through their lives, the ways in which love and
duty can redeem a blighted past.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York
Times
“Another dazzling journey with Toni Morrison as tour guide into
America's slippery psychological, cultural and political terrain.
In Home, Morrison has given us another triumph of beauty and
brutality both in tone, language, and characters. Like her slim
volumes The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Jazz, the Nobel Laureate’s tenth
offering reminds you of riveting tales told by a wise stranger—not
kinfolk, not on any official business—that remain with you for
days—sometimes longer. . . . Morrison proves there is no writer who
can craft, shape, twist, and bend the English language quite like
she can. . . . Home calmly lays out the horrors of war, abroad and
domestic, with the understanding that peace is sometimes
negotiable.” —Patrik Henry Bass, Essence
“Cinematic, poetic and profound. . . . Home, is, at its heart, the
tale of a man enslaved (in mind, body, and spirit), on an uncertain
journey to freedom. . . . The concept of home in Home becomes a
metaphor for the cultivation of an inner strength and dignity
independent of external factors, shielded from the vicissitudes of
an unjust society. In Morrison’s assessment, it seems that country
can be difficult to navigate alone, and relies not only on our self
acceptance, but also on the relationships and communities we build.
. . . [She] continues to beg the reader to reflect critically on
notions of identity, race, gender and class, and, perhaps most
importantly, to examine what me mean when we talk about freedom,
and the role we play as a community and as individuals, hand and
hand, and in a solitary way, in emancipating ourselves.” --Chase
Quinn, The Grio
“Nobel Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison begins her newest novel,
Home, with a question: How does a man rebuild himself while the
world chips away at his soul? That is the problem posed to
Frank Money, a Korean War veteran returned to the United States
after witnessing the horrors of combat on the front lines. Now a
shell of a man, Frank finds himself on a journey to rescue his
medically abused younger sister and return to his home in
small-town Georgia. . . . The problem goes deeper than race or
politics. It is not limited to questions of black or white (or
gender or economic status, for that matter), though those things
inform the issue. But the problem, ultimately, is personal in
nature. It's downright spiritual. . . . Immediately, a reader
senses in Morrison a seeker. Her prose reaches out for answers to
very difficult questions, feeling its way through the possibilities
of the story it presents. She has the psychological acuteness to
move beyond the realm of parable and into the realm of tragedy. The
writing is easy and flowing but still elegantly constructed. And it
doesn't settle for easy answers. We do not know if and how Frank
and his sister will ever find redemption. In the end, we only know
that home is a good place to start. . . . A wonderfully
pleasurable and rewarding literary experience.” —Gerard
Martinez, San Antonio Express-News
“Within its pared-down limits, [Home] tells a compelling story, and
the man at the center, Frank Money, is such a strong and convincing
character that we are not taken aback when Frank himself, speaking
in italics, interrupts the narrative a couple of times to set the
author straight on some details she got wrong. The novel is leanly
poetic, at times is very funny and is skillful in using symbols
without turning them into clichés. One of the best things about the
book is that it functions as a cultural and historical travelogue,
a fascinating commentary on crossing the country while black in the
middle of the 20th century. . . . A tale fit for an epic.” —Harper
Barnes, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“In her characteristically breathtaking prose, rich in all the
contradictions that make us human, Morrison transforms unthinkable
suffering into incomplete but believable redemption.” —Pam Houston,
More Magazine
“Stunning . . . A masterfully written novella that uses alternating
points of view, swift characterization-by-action and metaphorical
symmetry with a compression which is simultaneously a tour de force
and a tantalization. . . . . Regardless of narrator, the vividness
of the chapters and their concise accumulation of experiences give
Home a broader scope than would seem possible in so few pages.
Morrison unleashes her most lyrical language upon the foreshadowing
and depiction of Home’s most brutal events. Her technique is
indelible.” —Holloway McCandless, Shelf Awareness
“Toni Morrison doesn’t have to prove anything anymore, and there’s
artistic freedom in that calm. Her new novel, Home, is a
surprisingly unpretentious story from America’s only living Nobel
laureate in literature. . . . This scarily quiet tale packs all the
thundering themes Morrison has explored before. She’s never been
more concise, though, and that restraint demonstrates the full
range of her power. . . . Home is unusual, not only in that it
features a male protagonist but that it’s so fiercely focused on
the problem of manhood. . . . Are acts of violence essentially
masculine, or are they an abdication of manliness? Is it possible,
the novel finally asks, to consider the manhood implicit in
sacrifice, in laying down one’s life? What [Frank] Money eventually
does to help his sister and to quiet his demons is just as
surprising and quietly profound as everything else in this novel.
Despite all the old horrors that Morrison faces in these pages with
weary recognition, Home is a daringly hopeful story about the
possibility of healing—or at least surviving in a shadow of peace.”
—Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“The title of [Morrison’s] new novel, Home, refers to Frank Money’s
Georgia hometown, which lies at the end of a long, tortuous
journey. Traumatized by atrocities in Korea and the Deep South of
his childhood, Frank races back to save his sister from a sadistic
white doctor. It’s an archetypal postwar homecoming story,
reminiscent of The Odyssey. But it’s really about the upheavals
that took Frank away from home in the first place, along with a
generation of Korean War veterans and southern black migrants,
during a supposedly tranquil and homey decade that was, for them,
anything but.” —Boris Kachka, New York Magazine
“A bona fide literary event . . . an emotional powerhouse that more
than lives up to his pedigree. Told in the stark, economical tone
of a short story, with all the philosophical heft of a novel, . . .
Home is a moving testament to taking responsibility for your own
life—especially the parts you’d like to look away from. Grade:
A-” —Melissa Maerz, Entertainment Weekly
“Triumphant.” —Marie Claire
“Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is known for novels in which female
protagonists struggle to wrest control of their lives from an
establishment bent on their destruction. Home, by contrast, tells
the story of Korean War vet Frank Money, who returns from the
battlefield plagued by visions of his friends’ deaths and a
disturbing episode that cuts at the roots of his sexual and moral
identity. . . . Salvation awaits, however, in his tiny Georgia
hometown.” —Tim McDonnell, Mother Jones
“Home’s slim spine belies a fertile narrative imbued with and
embellished by Morrison’s visionary scope and poetic majesty. These
traits expand on her long exploration of the suffering and striving
born of slavery and segregation that are unique to the history of
blacks in America. Conjoined in all her stories and richly
illumined are the culture, traditions, talents, and triumphs of
African-Americans as well.” —Lisa Shea, ELLE
“Profound . . . Morrison’s portrayal of Frank is vivid and
intimate, her portraits of the women in his life equally masterful.
Its brevity, stark prose, and small cast of characters
notwithstanding, this story of a man struggling to reclaim his
roots and his manhood is enormously powerful.” —Stephan Lee,
O, The Oprah Magazine
“Morrison’s perfect prose [is] immaculate . . . Beautiful,
brutal.” —Publishers Weekly (boxed and starred
review)
“A deceptively rich and cumulatively powerful novel.” —Kirkus
(starred review)
“The Korean conflict is over, and soldier Frank Money has returned
to the States with a disturbed psyche that sends him beyond anger
into actually acting out his rage. From the mental ward in which he
has been incarcerated for an incident he can’t even remember, he
determines he must escape. He needs to get to Atlanta to attend to
his gravely ill sister and take her back to their Georgia hometown
of Lotus, which, although Frank realizes a return there is
necessary for his sister’s sake, remains a detestable place in his
mind. Morrison’s taut, lacerating novel observes, through the
struggles of Frank to move heaven and earth to reach and save his
little sister, how a damaged man can gather the fortitude to clear
his mind of war’s horror and face his own part in that horror,
leave the long-term anger he feels toward his hometown aside, and
take responsibility for his own life as well as hers. With the
economical presentation of a short story, the rhythms and cadences
of a poem, and the total embrace and resonance of a novel,
Morrison, one of our national literary treasures, continues to
marshal her considerable talents to draw a deeply moving narrative
and draw in a wide range of appreciative readers. . . . bound to be
a big hit.” —Brad Hooper, Booklist (starred review)
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