Jazz

‘Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past.... Morrison''s voice transcends colour and creed and she has become one of America''s outstanding post-war writers’ Guardian Joe Trace – in his fifties door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products erstwhile devoted husband – shoots dead his lover of three months the impetuous eighteen-year-old Dorcas. At the funeral his determined hard-working wife Violet who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound Jazz brings us back and forth in time in a narrative assembled from the hopes fears and realities of black urban life.‘She wrote about what was difficult and what was necessary and in doing so she unearthed for a generation of people a kind of redemption a kind of relief’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie New York Times BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction