Jazz

What Jazz is about

Winter, 1926, in Harlem. Joe Trace, a man in his fifties who sells Cleopatra beauty products door to door, has shot his eighteen-year-old lover, Dorcas, and his wife Violet, a hairdresser who mostly talks to birds, turns up at the funeral with a knife. Toni Morrison does not treat this as a whodunit. Instead she follows how these people, who came to the City from the South and West hoping for something better, arrived at such a moment, and the story reaches back to the mid-19th-century South as their pasts unfold. An unnamed narrator, whose identity is left for you to decide, drifts between past, present and future like a musician improvising. It is the middle volume of Morrison's trilogy on African-American history, between Beloved and Paradise.

Questions about Jazz

When was Jazz published?

Jazz by Toni Morrison was first published in 1992.

Was Jazz one of the best books of 1992?

Jazz is #22 on BookWard's Best Books of 1992, out of 43 1992 books that cleared our data bar. 231 readers have shelved it on Open Library.

Why is Jazz on the Best Books of 1992 list?

231 readers have shelved it on Open Library.

More of the best books of 1992

• Welcome to Dead House Robert Lawrence Stine, #1
• The Secret History Donna Tartt, #2
• The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes Bill Watterson, #3
• Snow Crash Neal Stephenson, #4
• The Shadow Rising Robert Jordan, #5
• The Artist's Way Julia Cameron, #6

See the full Best Books of 1992, the Top 100, or new books on Rising.