Ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary, Tar Baby is Toni Morrison's reinvention of the love story.

Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all the nuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites, masters and servants, and men and women.

BIO

Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

REVIEWS

"Deeply perceptive. . . . Return[s] risk and mischief to the contemporary American novel." --John Irving, The New York Times Book Review

"That rare commodity, a truly public novel. . . . Morrison's genius lies in her uncanny ability to immerse you totally in the world she creates." --Newsweek

"Arresting images, fierce intelligence, poetic language . . . One becomes entranced by Toni Morrison's story." --The Washington Post

[H] Knopf Publishing Group  /  March 12, 1981 

1.19" H x 8.63" L x 5.91" W (1.2 lbs) 320 pages

[P] Vintage  /  June 08, 2004 

0.71" H x 7.87" L x 5.2" W (0.75 lbs) 320 pages