Sula cover art

Sula

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Sula

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
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About this listen

From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner: Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. This brilliantly imagined novel brings us the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio.

Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.

©1973 Toni Morrison (P)2002 Random House, Inc. Random House Audio, a division of Random House, Inc. African American Classics Coming of Age Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

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Critic reviews

“Extravagantly beautiful. . . . Enormously, achingly alive. . . . A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter.” —The New York Times

“Exemplary. . . . The essential mysteries of death and sex, friendship and poverty are expressed with rare economy.” —Newsweek

“In characters like Sula, Toni Morrison’s originality and power emerge.” —The Nation
All stars
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Haunting story, beautifully written and I loved how she read this! Can't wait to pick up another Morrison.

Extraordinary

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It was great to rediscover this book I read over 30 years ago. Morrison’s ability to write about violent and devastating events that creep up on you so surprisingly never fails to amaze me. Can’t wait to listen to some more. Some odd edits where she repeats a few lines twice need editing
out in the recording but absolutely wonderful to hear her read it what a brilliant woman

Extraordinary writing

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Beautiful & poignant , absolutely wonderful to listen to . Both blunt & majestical in the use of language & the narration .

Stunning

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Fascinating and full of the oddest and loneliest characters - they remind me of people I've met. Toni Morrison has captured the turbulence and absurdities of people's lives, their joy, love and playfulness, as well as their hidden depths and the darker facets of their souls. This book is not easy reading/ listening, but it makes you sit up and take note. The book has a lonesome feel, but also a warmth.

Lonesome

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So excellently written and read all of your senses are vividly evoked! Truly wonferfully BRILLIANT

Sula

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The story grabed my attention with its raw descriptions. Horrific at times but evocative and moving. An honest and believable read.

Raw & Emotionally Gripping

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I loved Toni’s soft and gentle reading of this beautiful poetic novel. So deep, profound, splendid text, it was like savoring an exotic and fine desert for me. It easily not so much the plot, as the impredictibility, the depth, the feelings of the characters and the tenderness of the language that mesmerized me.

Poetic, elegant and raw

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I've made the same mistake once before, assuming that the author as narrator would make it especially good. In fact, though this is a great story, Morrison's narration makes it, at times, hard to follow. She has unusual intonation, almost as if she has forgotten what she is going to say, so you have to concentrate hard to get the meaning of a sentence. At times she talks very softly, at other times loud, so I had to keep changing the volume on the recording, and I missed some parts and had to rewind. All in all an amazing author, but it is clear from this that narration is a performance, and not everyone can be good at it, not even the author themselves.

Good story, poor narration

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Morrison certainly has a beautiful voice but is only a so-so reader of her own prose. Personally, I find the vocal softness and consistent pace makes the mood a bit samey, when the prose itself isn't, but that may be my personal taste for a more dramatic rendering. More problematic, though, is that the audio editing here is flawed. Several sentences and paragraphs are directly repeated, as if Morrison did a second take but the editor forgot to discard one of them. In addition, a longish passage of a few paragraphs on p.69 of my 2016 Vintage paperback re-issue are entirely omitted in the audio. It's not totally detrimental to the narrative to be without them, but may be a little confusing for anyone listening without reference to a physical copy of the book.

I would like to have seen better audio editing of this title and I wouldn't mind there being a choice of having it read by a professional actor to see if a non-authorial performance might raise it about the rather unmoving inflections given here.

Also, some annoying person at the audio end has grafted a loud solo guitar number over the author's last three or four paragraphs, completely distracting from the ending of the spoken audio. I really wish sound editors would NOT do this. I want to listen to the book, not to any music, particularly inappropriately chosen horrible music that is clearly a form of window-dressing/background rather than an artistic product in its own right.

Audio has odd repeats and omissions

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