Jazz by Toni Morrison [U.K. FIRST EDITION / FIRST PRINTING]

Jazz by Toni Morrison 

U.K. FIRST EDITION / FIRST PRINTING [1992] CHATTO & WINDUS London

Hardcover with dust jacket in excellent condition. 

Dust jacket in protective mylar cover.  Small water stain to upper-right-hand corner on back of an otherwise pristine Dust Jacket.  

Book itself is gorgeous.  Elegant black cover with gilded gold title on spine.  Pages read beautifully with just a hint of tanning.  

In the winter of 1926, when everybody everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead, Joe Trace, middle-aged door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. At the funeral, Joe's wife, Violet, attacks the girl's corpse. This passionate, profound story of love and obsession brings us back and forth in time, as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.

Jazz is the story of a triangle of passion, jealousy, murder, and redemption, of sex and spirituality, of slavery and liberation, of country and city, of being male and female, African American, and above all of being human. Like the music of its title, it is a dazzlingly lyric play on elemental themes, as soaring and daring as a Charlie Parker solo, as heartbreakingly powerful as the blues. It is Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison at her best.