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1 About this book
Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret.
It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
- Female friendship
- Domestic fiction
- Family life
- Classics
- Historical fiction
- African American women
- City and town life
- Southern states
2 What to expect
A short novel about two Black girls in a small Ohio town who grow up as close friends and choose opposite lives, one conventional, one defiantly free. It follows them and their community over several decades, in chapters headed by years, and asks what friendship, loyalty and goodness mean without telling you whom to side with. The prose is poetic and compressed, with sudden violence, and it leaves a great deal unexplained.
Good for readers who want: literary fiction, a complicated female friendship, and a short, intense read.
3 About Toni Morrison
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
4 More by Toni Morrison
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