Toni Morrison | featured news

Readers who insist on visiting the beach this summer — there is really nothing to see except sand and water, but I digress — need to make some fundamental decisions not just about what they want to read while dry-roasting themselves in the sun (new John Grisham vs. new Toni Morrison) but about how (e-reader device vs. Gutenberg device).

This haunting, slender novel is a kind of tiny Rosetta Stone to Toni Morrison’s entire oeuvre. “Home” encapsulates all the themes that have fueled her fiction, from the early novels “Sula” and “The Bluest Eye,” through her dazzling masterwork, “Beloved,” and more recent, less persuasive books like “Love” and “Paradise”: the hold that time past exerts over time present, the hazards of love (and its link to leaving and loss), the possibility of redemption and transcendence.