A dazzling tale of misbegotten dreams and desires, hopes and expectations, woven with poetry and storyteller magic.

I read Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novel The Mistress of Spices and felt excited and empowered by the way she used words

An unusual, clever, and often exquisite first novel...The result is rather as if Isabel Allende met Laura Esquivel.

A splendid novel, beautifully conceived and crafted.

Mythical and mystical, Mistress of Spices is reminiscent of fables and fairy tales. . . . The story Divakaruni tells is transporting, but it is her gift for metaphor that makes this novel live and breathe, its pages as redolent as any freshly ground spice.

For ARRANGED MARRIAGE, 'As irresistible as the impulse which leads her characters to surface to maturity, raising their heads above the floods of silver ignorance'

‘Morrison’s legacy in commemorating slavery’s survivors will endure and uplift for centuries to come'

‘Her every word a caress, her every sentence an embrace, her every paragraph, a cupping of her hands around our faces that said: I know you, I see you, we are together’

‘I have never read anyone else like her . . . She was an opener of doors, doors that seemed they might always be shut, doors shut so tight they seemed not to be doors at all’

‘Her legacy is total excellence . . . she is magnificent, her emotional intelligence is second to none and her bravery was equal to her artistry’

‘Morrison almost single-handedly took American fiction forward in the second half of the twentieth century’

‘[Toni Morrison’s] irreverence was godly’

A beautiful book and it's beautifully written

My favourite book of all time

Morrison's stunning trilogy is an evocation of black life over the past four centuries. It defies summary. Completed almost 25 years ago, these novels top anything produced by any American writer including Hemingway, Updike and DeLillo

[A] beautiful, haunting novel

More than one of Morrison's books could be classed as masterpieces, but this one is famous for a reason: everyone should read it

A magnificent achievement...an American masterpiece

A triumph

She melds horror and beauty in a story that will disturb the mind forever

Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature

A work of genuine force. . .Beautifully written

There is something great in Beloved: a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you

Superb...A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history...Exquisitely told