Tar Baby - (Vintage International) by Toni Morrison (Paperback)

About the Book

"Tar Baby," audacious and hypnotic, is masterful in its mingling of tones--of longing and alarm, of urbanity and a primal, mythic force in which the landscape itself becomes animate with a wild, dark complicity in the fates of the people whose drama unfolds.

Book Synopsis

A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner

Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between Blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

Review Quotes

"Deeply perceptive. . . . Return[s] risk and mischief to the contemporary American novel." --John Irving, The New York Times Book Review

"Toni Morrison has made herself into the D. H. Lawrence of the black psyche, transforming individuals into forces, idiosyncrasy into inevitability." --New York

"Arresting images, fierce intelligence, poetic language . . . One becomes entranced by Toni Morrison's story." --The Washington Post

"Wrenchingly good. A terrific book." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Hypnotic, stunningly alive." --The San Diego Union-Tribune

"That rare commodity, a truly public novel. . . . Morrison's genius lies in her uncanny ability to immerse you totally in the world she creates." --Newsweek

"Powerful. . . . A stunning performance. . . . Morrison is one of the most exciting living American writers." --Kansas City Star

"It takes one to the sheer edge of human relationships." --Vogue

"Wise, beautiful, astonishing, absolutely breathtaking." --St. Louis Globe-Democrat

"Reminds us again that Toni Morrison is one of the finest writers in America today." --Louisville Courier-Journal

"Tar Baby is stupendous. Morrison is a writer of amazing skill." --Roanoke Times & World

"Its scope is grand and the interplay complex. But Morrison has the control of a skilled choreographer, with a careful eye pinned on pacing, suspense, grace, and frenzy. . . . She has an awesome lyric flair." --The Charlotte Observer

About the Author

Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.