The Color Purple: A Novel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143135694 ISBN 13: 9780143135692

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2019

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker's iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book.

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker's epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.

About the Author:

Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, four children's books, and volumes of essays and poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1983 and the National Book Award. Along with her Pulitzer and National Book Award, Walker has been honored with the O. Henry Award and the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction. Additionally, she was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2006 and received the Lennon Ono Peace Award in 2010.

Review:

“Reading The Color Purple was the first time I had seen Southern, black women’s literature as world literature. In writing us into the world—bravely, unapologetically, and honestly—Alice Walker has given us a gift we will never be able to repay.”
—Tayari Jones

 “The Color Purple was what church should have been, what honest familial reckoning could have been, and it is still the only art object in the world by which all three generations of Black artists in my family judge American art.” 
—Kiese Laymon

 “A novel of permanent importance.”
—Peter S. Prescott, Newsweek

“Indelibly affecting ... Alice Walker is a lavishly gifted writer.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“A story of revelation . . . One of the great books of our time.”
—Essence Magazine

  “A work to stand beside literature of any time and place.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Places Walker in the company of Faulkner.”
—The Nation

 “Remarkable expressiveness, color, and poignancy . . . not only a memorable and infinitely touching character but a whole submerged world is vividly called into being.”
—The New York Review of Books

 “Richly evocative . . . a vibrant fugue of devotion and search for love.”
—Los Angeles Herald Examiner

“A national treasure . . . A rare and lovely book.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A saga filled with joy and pain, humor and bitterness, and an array of characters who live, breathe, and illuminate the world.”
—Publishers Weekly