Paradise

Paradise is a novel by the American writer Toni Morrison, published in 1997 and the third of the books she wrote around the same imaginative territory as Beloved and Jazz.

The book opens with the shooting at the Convent and then works backwards, through nine sections each named for a woman, to explain how the men of Ruby arrived at that morning. Ruby was founded in 1890 by families who had already been turned away from other settlements, and its people have spent generations defending a town they regard as the one all-black place worth the pain it cost. The women at the Convent arrived there separately and damaged: Connie, who has lived in the house longest; Mavis, who drove away from a family she could not keep; Grace, who was found by the side of a road; Seneca, who was abandoned as a child; and Divine, whose history is stranger than the others'. The town's evidence against them is a list of misfortunes, and the novel lets the reader see the lives behind the accusation while the men gather. Food, music, the Oven at the centre of Ruby and the language of the founders' sermons all carry the argument about who is entitled to belong, and the ending returns to the morning of the killings with the women's voices still unanswered.

It was Morrison's first novel after she received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and it was chosen for Oprah's Book Club in January 1998.