BookLens — See inside before you read

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What's in this book, at a glance — five things readers want to know before they start.

Violence

Some

Some violence including a childhood drowning accident and later acts of violence; depicted with Morrison's unflinching literary realism

Language

Some

Some adult language in the literary fiction register

Sexual Content

Some

Adult sexual relationships depicted with literary candor; Sula's sexuality is central to her character

Substance Use

Barely any

Minimal substance use

Emotional Intensity

A lot

Strong psychological content: the novel's moral complexity around freedom, friendship, betrayal, and complicity is its entire subject

What this book is about

Toni Morrison's second novel traces the forty-year friendship between Nel Wright and Sula Peace in the Bottom, a Black community in Ohio, from 1919 to 1965. Morrison's prose is dense and poetic, her moral vision uncompromising: Sula chooses radical freedom while Nel chooses convention, and neither is entirely right or wrong. The novel contains violence, death, sexual content, and one of literature's most disturbing scenes of childhood accident and adult indifference.