Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

This novel reates a magical world out of four generations of black life in America, a world readers enter on the day of the birth of Macon Dead, Jr.; the day on which lonely Robert Smith attempts to fly from a steeple of the hospital, a black Icarus looking homeward. New York Times Bestseller Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel Garc a M rquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world. You can't go wrong by reading or re-reading the collected works of Toni Morrison. Beloved , Song of Solomo n, The Bluest Eye , Sula , everything else -- they're transcendent, all of them. You'll be glad you read them.--Barack Obama