Home by Toni Morrison

Once again, Toni Morrison demonstrates her ability to weave a tale that is so strong and moving that it envelops you.  Her prose is like poetry, and I love to linger over the pages.  I would not, however, suggest you listen to the book on CD.  Morrison narrates and although I love her soft, slow paced voice, and introduction to the work would have sufficed.  I found it frustrating to listen to her for the entire book and abandoned the attempt. Keep to the written word and be filled with this story.

From Publishers Weekly:

In Pulitzer and Nobel Prize–winner Morrison’s immaculate new novel (after A Mercy), Frank Money returns from the horrors of the Korean War to an America that’s just as poor and just as racist as the country he fled. Frank’s only remaining connection to home is his troubled younger sister, Cee, “the first person [he] ever took responsibility for,” but he doesn’t know where she is. In the opening pages of the book, he receives a letter from a friend of Cee’s stating, “Come fast. She be dead if you tarry.” Thus begins his quest to save his sister—and to find peace in a town he loathed as a child: Lotus, Ga., the “worst place in the world, worse than any battlefield.” Told in alternating third- and first-person narration, with Frank advising and, from time to time, correcting the person writing down his life story, the novel’s opening scene describes horses mating, “[t]heir raised hooves crashing and striking, their manes tossing back from wild white eyes,” as one field over, the bodies of African-American men who were forced to fight to the death are buried: “...whatever you think and whatever you write down, know this: I really forgot about the burial. I only remembered the horses. They were so beautiful. So brutal.” Beautiful, brutal, as is Morrison’s perfect prose.