This is the story of eleven year old Pecola Breedlove – a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others – who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. It is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

‘The Bluest Eye’ is an enquiry into the reasons why beauty gets wasted in this country. The beauty in this case is black; the wasting is done by a cultural engine that seems to have been designed to murder possibilities. Toni Morrison’s prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry. This is a fine book – a lament for all starved and stunted children everywhere.

An Oprah Book Club pick.