Sula

Sula is Toni Morrison's second novel, published in 1973, and it was the book she wrote after The Bluest Eye. It is set in Medallion, Ohio, largely in a Black neighbourhood known as the Bottom, and it follows Nel Wright and Sula Peace from childhood into middle age.

The two are close in the way children are when they have decided that the rest of the town is not their business, and the friendship survives a secret they carry out of girlhood. Their lives then divide in the terms the community understands: Nel marries and becomes a settled, respectable presence, while Sula leaves, returns, and is treated as a pariah for the freedom she takes with other people's rules.

Morrison tells the story across decades, so the town's own history arrives alongside the two women, and the novel moves between their separate households and the neighbours who watch them. The years it covers run from just after the First World War into the 1960s, and the book is built on the difference between what the town decides a woman is and what the two friends make of themselves.