Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.

Busman's Honeymoon

Murder is hardly the best way for Lord Peter and his bride, the famous mystery writer Harriet Vane, to start their honeymoon. It all begins when the former owner of their newly acquired estate is found quite nastily dead in the cellar. And what Lord Peter had hoped would be a very private and romantic stay in the country soon turns into a most baffling case, what with the misspelled 'notise' to the milkman and the intriguing condition of the dead man - not a spot of blood on his smashed skull and not a pence less than six hundred pounds in his pocket.

The mythic patterns Toni Morrison explores in her third novel inform the transformation of "Milkman Dead". "Song of Solomon" traces Milkman's journey from spiritual death to understanding and acceptance of personal responsibility, his liberation symbolized by his discovery of the ability to fly. Caught between his father's materialism and his aunt's sense of family and history, Milkman moves to a greater awareness of his identity and previously untapped spiritual power.