Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which
immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-
Depression 1940s Ohio. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for
blue eyes like those of her privileged white schoolfellows. At once
intimate and expansive, unsparing in its truth-telling, The Bluest Eye
shows how the past savagely defines the present. A powerful examination of
our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison's virtuosic first
novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the
subtlety and grace that have always characterised her writing. 'She
revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon. She
suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from
the perils of the white gaze. That's why she told her stories. And why we
will never, ever stop reading them' Afua Hirsch 'Discovering a writer like
Toni Morrison is rarest of pleasures' Washington Post 'When she arrived,
with her first novel, The Bluest Eye, she immediately re-ordered the
American literary landscape' Ben Okri Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award
for achievement in American fiction