Love, Toni Morrison
Love, Toni Morrison
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Love

Author: Toni Morrison

Narrator: Toni Morrison, Karen Murray

Unabridged: 7 hr 56 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/28/2003

Synopsis

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a spellbinding symphony of passion and hatred, power and perversity, color and class that spans three generations of Black women in a fading beach town.

“A marvelous work, which enlarges our conception not only of love but of racial politics.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Century

In life, Bill Cosey enjoyed the affections of many women, who would do almost anything to gain his favor. In death his hold on them may be even stronger. Wife, daughter, granddaughter, employee, mistress: As Morrison’s protagonists stake their furious claim on Cosey’s memory and estate, using everything from intrigue to outright violence, she creates a work that is shrewd, funny, erotic, and heartwrenching.

About Toni Morrison

Possibly one of the best known and most talented Black authors, Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, was an American author, essayist, book editor, and college professor. She was born and grew up in Lorain, Ohio. She was the second of four children of a working class family. Her parents had difficult childhoods, with her father having witnessed a lynching of two Black businessmen who lived on his street. It was a very traumatic experience for her father, so he ended up moving to Ohio where there were more industrial jobs being offered. When Toni was about two years old, their landlord set fire to their house for non-payment of rent. They were home at the time. They laughed at the incident which she later described "as how her family kept their integrity and claimed their own life".

Morrison read frequently the works of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy. She took the Baptismal name of Anthony, which led to her nickname, Toni. She attended Lorain High School where she was on the debate team, participated in drama productions, and assisted with the yearbook. She then graduated from Howard University in English and the classics. Continuing her education, she completed her Master's Degree in two years from Cornell University, writing her thesis on Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner.

After graduating from Cornell, she settled in Texas, where she taught at Texas Southern University.

She has received about every prestigious award for her writing, which includes......The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved (which was made into a 1998 film), Jazz, Love, and A Mercy. Her highest honor was in 2012 when she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on April 29, 2025

by reading my first toni morrison i believed i would ascend into a higher plane. and i was right. i would like to apologize to all of the dinners i ruined with friends, my boyfriend, family, and other loved ones because i could not stop talking about the brilliant, dark, vibe-ruining concept of this......more

Goodreads review by Glenn on August 06, 2019

Updated, August 2019: RIP, Toni Morrison Over the past 15 years, I’ve tried a couple of times to read Toni Morrison’s epic, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about murder, guilt, ghosts and the brutal, complex physical and psychological legacy of slavery. Something about the dense, poetic prose and the el......more

Goodreads review by Angela M on August 14, 2019

The brutal truth, brilliantly written. A mother hanging from a tree, the vile debasement of a nursing mother, scars so deep from whipping that they make a design of a tree on a woman’s back, a bloodied dead baby, the ultimate symbol of how truly horrific slavery was. These are some of the images tha......more

Goodreads review by Will on August 28, 2020

There are reasons why Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Beloved may be the biggest one. The structure is a ghost story about a woman who killed her own children rather than see them be dragged back from freedom to live a life of slavery, and how the guilt of that act comes ba......more

Goodreads review by Violet on February 23, 2019

This is one of those rare and beautiful books that begins as if it's written in a code you have to crack. You have the sense early on that you've missed some vital shred of information and it's these perceived black holes that engage your attention on an ever deepening level. As is the case in the b......more

Quotes

"It's a dense, dark star of a novel, seemingly eccentric, secretly shapely, and with Morrison writing at the top of her game."
—David Gates, Newsweek

"Haunting. In lyrical flashbacks, Morrison slowly, teasingly reveals the glories and horrors of the past. Morrison has crafted a gorgeous, stately novel."
—Publisher's Weekly

"Love is a profound novel. As a vivid painter of human emotions, Morrison is without peer, her impressions rendered in an exquisitely metaphoric but comfortably open style."
—Brad Hooper, Booklist (starred and boxed review)

"A gorgeous deployment of enigmatic flashbacks, Love is an elegantly shaped epic of infatuation, enslavement, and liberation: a rich and heartening return to Nobel-worthy form."
—Kirkus (starred review)

“Love seduces with Toni Morrison’s signature lush prose and colorfully complex, textured scenes of human longing, suffering, and loss. She long ago claimed a place at the apex of American letters; her latest outing adds another darkly sparkling layer to that literary luster.”
—Elle (US)

Praise for Toni Morrison:
“There’s no escaping love in Toni Morrison’s novels: it’s a difficult, complicated, ferocious force that runs like a deep and turbulent river through all her fiction, sometimes transporting and sometimes destroying people. It’s no wonder her own characters cry out against it.”
—Catherine Bush

“To read [Paradise] is to be pulled into a passionate, contentious and sometimes violent world and to confront questions as old as human civilization itself. . . . It is a tale of Faulknerian complexity and power.”
—Time

“In each of her six novels she excavates the past, tunnelling through atrocities and griefs to reach back into an American history that has been long buried. The denied past becomes a ghost that haunts the present; old bones won’t stay safely underground.”
—Toronto Star

“In [Morrison’s] landscape, ghosts mingle with runaway slaves and wild men and women of the forest. Nothing and no one is ordinary, and perceptions shift as she reinvents the world.”
—The Globe and Mail

“In her novel Beloved. . .Ms. Morrison restores to the collective memory a particular strand of its emotive past, turning a story of former slaves into what amounts to a national epic. . . . She offers everyone — not just those injured — the chance to feel the pain, the injustice and the need for healing.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“The suppleness of her language verges on poetry. . . . The intensity of carnal love and the intensity of affection among strangers make for a kind of paradise.”
—The Financial Post

Awards

  • Nobel Prize
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