Paradise

Ruby, Oklahoma is an all-Black town founded by the descendants of freedmen who were turned away from every "safe" place they sought — a community built on pride, self-sufficiency, and a fierce determination never to be excluded again. Seventeen miles outside Ruby stands the Convent, a former mansion where a shifting group of women with wounded pasts have found refuge together, living outside the town's rigid rules.

To Ruby's patriarchs, the Convent and its unmoored women come to represent everything threatening their idea of paradise, and the novel opens with the town's men descending on the house with guns. From that violent frame, Toni Morrison circles back through the histories of Ruby's founding families and of each woman who made her way to the Convent, braiding their stories into a meditation on race, patriarchy, faith, and belonging.

The third novel in Morrison's loosely linked trilogy that began with Beloved and Jazz, Paradise is her first book after the Nobel Prize — a demanding, polyphonic work about the human hunger to build a haven, and the cost of deciding who is allowed inside it.