"Four young women are brutally attacked near an all-black town in rural Oklahoma. The inevitability of this attack, and the attempts to avert it, lie at the heart of Paradise. Spanning the birth of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the counter-culture of the late 1970s, deftly manipulating past, present and future, this novel reveals the interior lives of its American citizens with astonishing clarity. It is through their eyes we see the clashes that have defined a nation. 'When Morrison writes at her best, you can feel the workings of history through her prose' Hilary Mantel, Spectator 'Morrison almost single-handedly took American fiction forward in the second half of the 20th century, to a place where it could finally embrace the subtleties and contradictions of the great stain of race which has blighted the republic since its inception' Caryl Phillips, Guardian BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED **Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction**"