Reading Order
Paradise Reading Order
Paradise (1997) by Toni Morrison is her seventh novel and the conclusion of the trilogy that began with Beloved (1987) and continued with Jazz (1992). Set in the fictional all-Black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, founded in 1949 by the descendants of freed slaves who were rejected by established Black communities after Reconstruction because they were too dark, Paradise opens with the line: 'They shoot the white girl first.' Nine men from Ruby attack the Convent, a former Catholic mansion that has become a refuge for women who have fled their lives, and kill or wound the women inside. The novel then moves backward and forward in time to understand both Ruby and the Convent: the history of Ruby's founding families, their rigid social hierarchy, and their increasingly desperate attempt to maintain a kind of perfection that excludes and punishes difference; and the Convent women — their histories, their healing, their community. Paradise is Morrison's most ambitious structural novel and her most theological — the questions of Eden, paradise, exclusion, and who gets to define the ideal community are at the novel's center. The founding families of Ruby believe they are building a Black paradise, a community so perfect it needs to be protected from contamination; the Convent women represent the contamination. Morrison does not resolve who the 'white girl' is until near the end, and the ambiguity is itself part of the novel's argument about what race and community mean.
Where to start
Read Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992) first — Paradise is the trilogy's conclusion and is most powerful read after the others. Any Knopf or Vintage paperback of Paradise.
Complete Paradise Book List
- 1Buy
Paradise
Toni Morrison·1997·The novel — Ruby, Oklahoma; the attack on the Convent; the all-Black town's rigid social hierarchy and its attempt to build a perfect community; the third part of the Morrison trilogy and the most theological and structurally ambitious of the three. - 2Buy
Beloved
Toni Morrison·1987·The first part of the trilogy — Sethe's slavery past, Beloved's ghost, the cost of freedom; the essential predecessor to Paradise and Morrison's most celebrated novel. - 3Buy
Jazz
Toni Morrison·1992·The second part of the trilogy — Harlem 1926; Joe and Violet Trace; the Jazz Age Great Migration novel; the structural middle of the trilogy between the slavery past of Beloved and the post-Reconstruction present of Paradise. - 4Buy
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison·1977·Morrison's breakthrough novel — Milkman Dead's search for ancestral history; the companion in her fiction about African American communities and the tension between the past and the present. - 5Buy
Sula
Toni Morrison·1973·Morrison's second novel — the companion in her fiction about all-Black communities, the way such communities define and police their members, and the women who refuse their prescribed roles. - 6Buy
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison·1952·Ellison's National Book Award-winning novel — the companion in African American fiction about the ideal community and the ideology of Black separatism; the Brotherhood and the narrator's disillusionment are the companion to Ruby's founding ideology and its consequences. - 7Buy
The Color Purple
Alice Walker·1982·Walker's Pulitzer-winning novel — the companion in African American women's fiction about violence against women, community, and healing; Celie's letters are the companion to the Convent women's histories of damage and recovery. - 8Buy
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson·1980·Robinson's debut novel — the companion in literary fiction about women who refuse to be defined by their communities' expectations; Ruth and Sylvie's refusal of the social script in Fingerbone, Idaho is the companion to the Convent women's refusal of what Ruby expects.
Paradise — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Paradise by Toni Morrison about?
Paradise opens with an attack: nine men from the all-Black town of Ruby, Oklahoma shoot and kill women at the Convent, a former mansion that has become a refuge for women on the margins. The novel's first line — 'They shoot the white girl first' — establishes the racial ambiguity that runs through the book: we are never told which of the Convent women is white. The novel then moves through the histories of Ruby and the Convent: the founding families of Ruby who created the town as a perfect Black community after being rejected by other Black communities for being too dark; the rigid social hierarchy they built; their increasingly desperate attempts to maintain Ruby's purity; and the Convent women who have come to the former mansion trailing their damaged lives.
Who are the Convent women?
The Convent women are five women who have found their way to the former mansion outside Ruby: Consolata (Connie), the Brazilian-born Catholic woman who has been there longest and who functions as a kind of spiritual mother; Mavis, who drove over her two children and cannot forgive herself; Grace (Gigi), who came looking for a lover and stayed; Seneca, who grew up in foster care; and Pallas, the youngest, who fled her own traumatic history. Each woman is damaged, each has fled something, and the Convent is the place where, under Connie's spiritual guidance, they begin to heal. Morrison gives each woman her own chapter and her own history, and the Convent community they build — however strange — is the novel's answer to Ruby's rigid perfection.
Why is Paradise the most difficult Morrison novel?
Paradise is difficult for several reasons. The structure is unusual: it opens with the attack on the Convent, then moves backward in time through the histories of multiple characters and both communities before returning to the attack and its aftermath. Morrison deliberately withholds certain information — most famously, which of the Convent women is white — and the novel resists the kind of narrative resolution that conventional fiction provides. The theological dimension is also demanding: Paradise is in sustained dialogue with Christian theology, with the idea of Eden, with what it means to build a paradise that requires the exclusion of the impure. Morrison is asking questions she deliberately does not answer.
How does Paradise complete the trilogy?
Paradise completes the trilogy by moving from the immediate aftermath of slavery (Beloved, 1870s) through the Jazz Age Great Migration (Jazz, 1926) to the post-Reconstruction era of Black community-building and its contradictions (Paradise, 1970s). The three novels together form a panorama of African American history from emancipation through the civil rights era, and all three center on violence against Black women and on the way the past continues to shape the present. Paradise's examination of the all-Black town that recreates the exclusion it experienced — becoming the oppressor in its attempt to build a perfect community — is the trilogy's most painful and most explicitly theological argument.
What should I read after Paradise by Toni Morrison?
After Paradise, Beloved (1987) is the trilogy's beginning and Morrison's most celebrated novel. Jazz (1992) is the second novel of the trilogy. Song of Solomon (1977) and Sula (1973) are Morrison's other major novels. For American fiction about ideal communities and their inevitable failures, Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed are important companions.
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