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Reading lists

The Ultimate Black History Month reading list

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13 essential Vintage books for Black History Month

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Features

The best literary quotes about summer

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10 times fiction changed the world

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15 songs about books for your summer playlist

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9 of our favourite mothers in classic books

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Where to start reading Toni Morrison’s books

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The best horror stories told in novels, ranked from scary to terrifying

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Floral fiction: a book-lover’s guide to the best flowers in literature

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‘No need to sparkle’: why we should all take Virginia Woolf’s advice in 2021

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The best literary quotes about winter

9 beautiful books against a white flat lay 

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10 Beautiful books that make perfect Christmas gifts this year

A flatlay of covers of Great American Novels

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The Greatest American Novels you should read

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The best literary quotes about hope and optimism

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Witches, ghosts and feminism: how female authors are rewriting horror fiction

The 1980s was a decade of massive social, political and cultural change. 

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Books that shaped the 1980s

“Everyone needs to read this book”: Bernardine Evaristo, Sara Collins and more authors share their essential anti-racism reads

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“Everyone needs to read this book”: Bernardine Evaristo, Sara Collins and more authors on their essential anti-racism reads

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Footnotes: A new documentary about Toni Morrison offers fresh insight into her groundbreaking work

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8 Great VINTAGE Love Stories

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12 VINTAGE books that make perfect last-minute gifts

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Toni Morrison, 1931-2019

Vintage Summer and Cubitts sunglasses competition

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Competitions

Win a VINTAGE non-fiction book bundle and a pair of Cubitts sunglasses

Read women: A reading list of VINTAGE Classic and new female authors for 2019

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Read women in 2019: VINTAGE classic and new female authors

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Behind the Beatrix Potter designer editions

Love

VINTAGE CLASSICS' AMERICAN GOTHIC SERIES 
Spine-tingling, mind-altering and deliciously atmospheric, journey into the dark side of America with nine of its most uncanny classics. 
 
A haunting and affecting meditation on love from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved. 
 
May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida - even L - all are women obsessed with Bill Cosey. He shapes their yearnings for a father, husband, lover, guardian, and friend. This audacious vision from a master storyteller on the nature of love - its appetite, its sublime possession, and its consuming dread - is rich in characters and dramatic events, and in its profound sensitivity to just how alive the past can be. Sensual, elegiac and unforgettable, Love ultimately comes full circle to that indelible, overwhelming first love that marks us forever. 
 
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction 
 
'Love is her best work...a slender but mesmerising tale' Evening Standard

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

Jazz

'What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?' 
 
Joe Trace - in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband - shoots dead his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas. 
 
At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life. 
 
VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.

Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past, not in fiction today.... Morrison's voice transcends colour and creed and she has become one of America's outstanding post-war writers... A great storyteller, her characters have amazing and terrible pasts - they must find them out, or be haunted by them

Morrison’s writing of a black romance pays its debt to blues music, the rhythms and the melancholy pleasures of which she has so magically transformed into a novel

The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to black women

Wonderful... A brilliant, daring novel... Every voice amazes

As rich in themes and poetic images as her Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved... Morrison conjures up the hand of slavery on Harlem's jazz generation. The more you listen, the more you crave to hear

She may be the last classic American writer, squarely in the tradition of Poe, Melville, Twain and Faulkner

[A] masterpiece... She has moved from strength to strength until she has reached the distinction of being beyond comparison

A masterpiece... A sensuous, haunting story of various kinds of passion... Mesmerizing

Thrillingly written...seductive... Some of the finest lyric passages ever written in a modern novel

A compelling blend of heart and language... Resounds with passion

She captures that almost indistinguishable mixture of the anxiety and rapture of expectation - that state of desire where sin is just another word for appetite

Lyrically brooding... One accepts the characters of Jazz as generalized figures moving rhythmically in the narrator's mind

She is the best writer in America. Jazz, for sure; but also Mozart

Transforms a familiar refrain of jilted love into a bold, sustaining time of self-knowledge and discovery. Its rhythms are infectious

A tale of love, death, beauty, murder and obsession...told in a free-form syncopated prose so rhythmic that you can almost imagine Nina Simone singing it

Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.

The Bluest Eye

Stunningly-designed new editions of Toni Morrison’s best-known novels, published by Vintage Classics in celebration of her life and work. 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS, AUTHOR OF QUEENIE 
 
Pecola Breedlove longs for blond hair and blue eyes, so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. In the autumn of 1941, the marigolds in her garden will not bloom, and her wish will not come true. Pecola's life is about to change in other painful and devastating ways. 
 
A powerful interrogation of what it means to conform to an idea of beauty, The Bluest Eye asks vital questions about race, class and gender and remains one of Toni Morrison’s most unforgettable works.

Searing and haunting... [The Bluest Eye] is a unique piece of literature because it is both timeless and relevant

Sula

Stunningly-designed new editions of Toni Morrison's best-known novels, published by Vintage Classics in celebration of her life and work. 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY NAMWALI SERPELL, AUTHOR OF THE OLD DRIFT 
 
As young girls in a poor but close-knit community, Nel and Sula are inseparable. But their paths as adults couldn't be more different: while Nel settles in town to raise a family, Sula escapes for the progressive ideals of the big city. When Sula reappears ten years later, she comes face to face with a community whose values are at odds with her fierce individualism and rebellious ways. Reunited, Nel and Sula must confront the consequences of their actions and the dreadful secret they shared in childhood. 
 
Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. Terrifying, comic and tragic, Sula overflows with love and life, friendship and betrayal.

Toni Morrison (Author) Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight. Namwali Serpell (Introducer) Namwali Serpell was born in Lusaka and lives in New York. She has received a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction, the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, and a 2011 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Her debut novel, The Old Drift, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and the Los Angeles Times' Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; it was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2019 by the New York Times Book Review and one of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of the Year. Her nonfiction book, Stranger Faces, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her short story, 'Take It', was a finalist for the 2020 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. She is a Professor of English at Harvard.

Song of Solomon

Stunningly-designed new editions of Toni Morrison's best-known novels, published by Vintage Classics in celebration of her life and work. 
 
WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR MARLON JAMES 
 
Soon after a local eccentric leaps from a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight, Macon 'Milkman' Dead III is born. Brought up by his well-off black family to revere the white world around him, Milkman strives to make sense of his conflicting identities. Always seeking flight in some way, he leaves his Michigan home for the South, retracing the steps of his forebears in search of his own buried heritage and is introduced to an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins; the inhabitants of a fully realised black world. 
 
Evocative and kaleidoscopic, Song of Solomon is a brilliantly imagined coming-of-age tale.

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her

The poetry of the language. The vernacular and the rhythms of speech... It's eavesdropping on a slice of life. You care for every character. You love them, you bleed for them. It's a masterclass in narrative fiction. It's a book that not only makes me want to be a better writer, but a better person as well

Stunningly beautiful... Full of magnificent people... They are still haunting my house. I suspect they will be with me forever

Song of Solomon…profoundly changed my life

A rhapsodic work... Intricate and inventive

A complex, wonderfully alive and imaginative story...glittering

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon grips as a novel of extraordinary truth, wisdom and humour

The language of Morrison's third novel astounds from its first pages to its triumphant conclusion... an epic of the African-American experience

Toni Morrison has written a brilliant prose tale that surveys nearly a century of American history as it impinges on a single family

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon grips as a novel of extraordinary truth, wisdom and humour

A stunning novel that's steeped in black history

Toni Morrison (Author) Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight. Marlon James (Introducer) Marlon James is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling, National Book Award-finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf; the Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings; The Book of Night Women and John Crow's Devil. In addition to the Booker Prize, his novels have won the American Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Born in Jamaica, Marlon James now lives in New York City.

Recitatif

'Toni Morrison was the lodestar who inspired us' Bernadine Evaristo 
 
Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old, when they were thrown together as roommates in a girls' shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only to meet again later at a diner, a grocery store and then at a protest. The two women are seemingly at opposite ends of every problem but, despite their conflict, the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them is undeniable. 
 
 Recitatif keeps Twyla's and Roberta's races ambiguous throughout the story. We know that one is white and one is black, but which is which? And who is right about the race of the woman the girls tormented at the orphanage? 
 
 This story is a masterful exploration of what keeps us together and what keeps us apart, of race and the relationships that shape our lives. Now with a new introduction by Zadie Smith, it is as radically compelling and relevant today as it was when first written nearly forty years ago. 
 
 
'Toni Morrison is the greatest chronicler of the American experience that we have ever known' Tayari Jones 
 
'Her work is an act of giving her community back to itself, so that people - African-Americans but the diaspora as well - can see and witness themselves' Diana Evans

This smart slippery tale... [is] highly relevant to our times... [Recitatif] serves as a challenge to contemporary novels that prefer to take refuge in racial orthodoxy than unsettle it, as Morrison so brilliantly does here

A compelling exploration of race and relationships

So thought-provoking you'll want everyone you know to read it

Toni Morrison (Author) Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight. Zadie Smith (Introducer) Zadie Smith was born in north-west London in 1975. She is the author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as The Embassy of Cambodia and the essay collection, Changing My Mind. She is also the editor of The Book of Other People, is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has twice been listed as one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Novelists. She has won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award among many others, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Toni Morrison

A special edition of the award-winning classic

A beautiful hardback edition of the Pulitzer-prize winning novel, from the great Toni Morrison. 
 
Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home - the farm where she was kept as a slave for many years. Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, Sethe is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, 'Beloved'. 
 
A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison's enduring masterpiece and best-known work. 
 
'An American masterpiece' A. S. Byatt 
 
'Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours... Beloved is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all' Margaret Atwood, New York Times 
 
**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World** 
 
VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Bound to be beautiful

Toni Morrison

Beloved

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