Morrison's second novel is set in the Bottom, the Black neighbourhood on the hills above Medallion, Ohio — land a white farmer jokingly gave an enslaved man as freedom's reward — and follows two girls who grow into opposite kinds of women. Nel Wright, raised by a fastidious, respectable mother, chooses marriage and continuity; Sula Peace, raised in Eva Peace's disorderly, man-filled house, leaves for ten years and returns unrepentant, taking other women's husbands and refusing every rule the community lives by. The Bottom, which cannot forgive her freedom, organises its own goodness against her supposed evil, and only after Sula's death does Nel confront what their friendship, a shared childhood secret involving the drowned boy Chicken Little, and her own conformity have actually cost. Around them Morrison builds a whole community — Eva, who sacrificed a leg to feed her children; Hannah; and Shadrack, a shell-shocked veteran who institutes National Suicide Day. Compact, poetic and morally unsettling, Sula refuses to sort its women into good and bad, and it was nominated for the National Book Award.
Author: Toni Morrison · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 1973