NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An official Oprah Winfreys The Books That Help Me Through selection The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner transfigures the coming-of-age story with this brilliantly imaginednovel. Includes a new foreword by the author.

One of The Atlantics Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

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.As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his familys origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.

Morrison moves easily in and out of the lives and thoughts of her characters, luxuriating in the diversity of circumstances and personality, and revelling in the sound of their voices and of her own, which echoes and elaborates theirs. The New Yorker