NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - An official Oprah Winfrey's "The Books That Help Me Through" selection - The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story with this brilliantly imagined novel. Includes a foreword by the author and a new introduction by Tayari Jones.
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
"A rhapsodic work. . . . Intricate and inventive." --The New Yorker
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.
"A rich, full novel. . . . It lifts us up [and] impresses itself upon us like a love affair." -- The New York Times Book Review
"A rhapsodic work. . . . Intricate and inventive." -- The New Yorker
"Stunningly beautiful. . . . Full of magnificent people. . . . They are still haunting my house. I suspect they will be with me forever." --Anne Tyler, The Washington Post
"If Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man went underground, Toni Morrison's Milkman flies." --John Leonard, The New York Times Book Review
"It places Toni Morrison in the front rank of contemporary American writers. She has written a novel that will endure." -- The Washington Post
"Lovely. . . . A delight, full of lyrical variety and allusiveness. . . . [An] exceptionally diverse novel." -- The Atlantic Monthly
"Morrison is a terrific storyteller. . . . Her writing evokes the joyful richness of life." -- Newsday
Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.