Toni Morrison to publish new novel on childhood trauma

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison will release a new novel next spring “about the way childhood trauma shapes and misshapes the life of the adult”, her publisher has announced.

Morrison, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1993 for novels that the committee said were “characterised by visionary force and poetic import [and which give] life to an essential aspect of American reality”, will publish God Help the Child on 30 April 2015. Her 11th novel is the story of a woman who calls herself Bride, “whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life; but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love until she told a lie that ruined the life of an innocent woman, a lie whose reverberations refuse to diminish”, according to Morrison’s US publisher Knopf.

The 192-page novel opens with a denial: “It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened.” Knopf promises that God Help the Child, Morrison’s first novel since 2012’s Home, will also feature “Booker, the man Bride loves and loses, whose core of anger was born in the wake of the childhood murder of his beloved brother … Rain, the mysterious white child, who finds in Bride the only person she can talk to about the abuse she’s suffered at the hands of her prostitute mother … and Sweetness, Bride’s mother, who takes a lifetime to understand that ‘what you do to children matters. And they might never forget’.”

“It is a compact, fierce work of contemporary fiction, one that unfolds in the aftermath of an allegation made by a student about a teacher,” said Sonny Mehta, Knopf’s chairman.

Morrison has also won the Pulitzer, the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and the National Book Critics Circle award, and has sold more than 15m copies of her books in the US. She recently told television host Stephen Colbert that she had just reread Beloved, named as one of the Books That Shaped America by the Library of Congress in 2012, for the first time. “I never read them after I finish them,” she said, adding: “It’s really good!”

Morrison also told Colbert that “racism is a construct; a social construct. And it has benefits. Money can be made off of it. People who don’t like themselves can feel better because of it. It can describe certain kinds of behaviour that are wrong or misleading. So [racism] has a social function. But race can only be defined as a human being.”