Description
Book Synopsis'What's the world for you if you can't make it up the way you want it?'
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.
VINTAGE DECO: Nine blazing, daring novels to celebrate the 1920s - 100 years on.
Trade ReviewA great storyteller * Guardian *
Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past, not in fiction today.... Morrison's voice transcends colour and creed and she has become one of America's outstanding post-war writers... A great storyteller, her characters have amazing and terrible pasts - they must find them out, or be haunted by them * Guardian *
Morrison’s writing of a black romance pays its debt to blues music, the rhythms and the melancholy pleasures of which she has so magically transformed into a novel * London Review of Books *
The author conjures up worlds with complete authority and makes no secret of her angst at the injustices dealt to black women * New York Times Book Review *
Wonderful... A brilliant, daring novel... Every voice amazes * Chicago Tribune *
