The 100 best novels: No 89 – Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

The novel with which the Nobel prize-winning author established her name is a kaleidoscopic evocation of the African-American experience in the 20th century

I first read Toni Morrison in 1977 when a proof copy of her novel, Song of Solomon, was on offer to the then-independent publisher, Chatto & Windus, for whom I was working as a young editor. Part of my background reading for this, her third book, involved discovering, and falling in love with, her debut, The Bluest Eye (1970), and its successor, Sula (1973). Since then, I have followed most of Morrison’s subsequent fiction, notably Beloved and Jazz, but I remain a diehard fan of the novel that established her name. From 1977 on, she only grew in stature as a contemporary writer of extraordinary power and vision, ultimately becoming, in 1993, the first African-American woman to win the Nobel prize for literature.

Song of Solomon blazed that trail. It was the first book by a black American woman writer to be chosen as a main selection of the all-powerful Book of the Month Club, a recognition unknown to the black community since Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940).

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