(Chatto & Windus, £14.99)
Toni Morrison, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, is known best for novels that examine the history of race in the US. Her new book moves into the present day to reflect on child abuse, a theme equally predisposed to the powerful but sometimes schematic sense of despair that governs her work.
The main character, Bride, was rejected by her mother at birth because of her dark skin, winning affection only when (aged eight) she testified against a teacher accused of raping pupils. We join the action 15 years later, when Bride, now a cosmetics executive in California, decides to make contact with the convict. Their unfinished business is the catalyst for a multi-voiced narrative in which everyone’s story, even that of the smallest cameo, turns on sex crime. It’s a blunt and lurid way to express the idea that “what you do to children matters,” as someone here says, and the complex motivations of Morrison’s troubled cast don’t always feel sufficiently dramatised.
One peculiar thread involves the regression of Bride’s body into prepubescence after she breaks up with her lover, a trumpet-playing intellectual. His own tragic history, nested near the end, contains some of the book’s pithiest lines (“He didn’t want an outsider judging his family. That was his job”), but overall this is a hard novel to admire, with something smug in the way Morrison introduces the possibility of redemption only to mock it.
