The novels of Toni Morrison, the first African-American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, are powerful not just because of their content - her themes include infanticide, rape, child abuse, murder and sexual jealousy - but because of their innovative form and language. This succinct critical introduction to her work seeks to make her novels more accessible to student and general reader alike through unravelling notions of self, representation and narrative structure which will be new to readers accustomed to Euro-American literary conventions.