Jazz

Harlem, winter 1926: Joe Trace, fifty years old, a door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his eighteen-year-old lover, Dorcas, at a rent party — and at the funeral his wife Violet comes at the dead girl's face with a knife. The novel then circles outward and backward in time, improvising like its title music: to Joe's and Violet's Virginia childhoods and the parents neither of them knew, to the Great Migration that carried them to "the City," and to the city itself as a seducer of everyone who arrives in it. The narration keeps revising what it has told — assuming, correcting, swinging back — until the crime reads less as a mystery than as the sum of everything that made these people.

Author: Toni Morrison · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 1992