Tar Baby

By Toni Morrison,

Book cover of Tar Baby

Book description

A ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary reinvention of the love story by the legendary Nobel Prize winner

Jadine Childs is a Black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a Black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes…

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Why read it?

1 author picked Tar Baby as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I came to Toni Morrison a little late. This was in the 1980s, after she’d won the Pulitzer. I read Song of Solomon first, upon the recommendation of a friend who told me he couldn’t read the end of the novel without bursting into tears. Next, Beloved: I was so awed that I reread it five times in a row!

At that point, I realized that I needed to circle back and start with her first books. The Bluest Eye and Sula both stunned me.

Then came Tar Baby. I immediately understood it to be different from the…

From David's list on complicated Black-white relations.

If you love Tar Baby...

Ad

Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest By Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

Want books like Tar Baby?

Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 100 books like Tar Baby.

Browse books like Tar Baby

Book cover of Small Island
Book cover of The Known World
Book cover of Kindred

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,581

readers submitted
so far, will you?

Ad

📚 If you like Tar Baby, you might also like...

Book cover of The Stark Beauty of Last Things

The Stark Beauty of Last Things By Céline Keating,

This book is set in Montauk, under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land. Everyone in town has a…

Book cover of A Long Way from Iowa: From the Heartland to the Heart of France

A Long Way from Iowa By Janet Hulstrand,

This memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel. The story begins in 1992 in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn as the author reads a notebook written by her grandmother nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year search…

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in fugitives, African Americans, and the Caribbean?

Fugitives 25 books
African Americans 813 books
The Caribbean 208 books