Love, Toni Morrison
Love, Toni Morrison
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Love

Author: Toni Morrison

Narrator: Toni Morrison

Unabridged: 7 hr 45 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/28/2003


Synopsis

From the internationally acclaimed Nobel laureate comes a richly conceived novel that illuminates the full spectrum of desire.

May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida -- even L: all women obsessed by Bill Cosey. More than the wealthy owner of the famous Cosey Hotel and Resort, he shapes their yearnings for father, husband, lover, guardian, friend, yearnings that dominate the lives of these women long after his death. Yet while he is both the void in, and the centre of, their stories, he himself is driven by secret forces -- a troubled past and a spellbinding woman named Celestial.

This audacious vision of the nature of love -- its appetite, its sublime possession, its dread -- is rich in characters and striking scenes, and in its profound understanding of how alive the past can be.

A major addition to the canon of one of the world’s literary masters.

This is coast country, humid and God fearing, where female recklessness runs too deep for short shorts or thongs or cameras. But then or now, decent underwear or none, wild women never could hide their innocence -- a kind of pitty-kitty hopefulness that their prince was on his way. Especially the tough ones with their box cutters and dirty language, or the glossy ones with two-seated cars and a pocketbook full of dope. Even the ones who wear scars like Presidential medals and stockings rolled at their ankles can’t hide the sugar-child, the winsome baby girl curled up somewhere inside, between the ribs, say, or under the heart. -- from Love

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