Tar Baby

Author: Morrison, Toni

Caribbean islands

Published on 6 November 1997 by Vintage Publishing (Vintage) in the United Kingdom.

An unforgettable and transformative novel that explores race and gender with scorching insight from the Nobel-prize winning author of Beloved.

Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine, a sophisticated graduate of the Sorbonne, art historian – a black American now living in Paris and Rome. Then there’s Son, a criminal on the run, uneducated, violent, contemptuous – a young American black of extreme beauty from small-town Florida. As Morrison follows their affair, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction‘Toni Morrison was a quintessential, unabashedly American writer. Like her fellow giant, Walt Whitman, her work was, above all, audacious. She seized the landscape with a flourish and wove it, unwove it and put it back together’ Bonnie Greer, Guardian