Paradise

In "Paradise" -- her first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature -- Toni Morrison gives us a bravura performance. As the novel begins deep in Oklahoma early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby (pop. 360), in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain, " assault the nearby Convent and the women in it. From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, "Paradise" tells the story of a people ever mindful of the relationship between their spectacular history and a void "Out There . . . . where random and organized evil erupted when and where it chose." Richly imagined and elegantly composed, "Paradise" weaves a powerful mystery.