Love (Morrison novel)

For the 1971 novel by Angela Carter, see Love (Carter novel). For the 2020 novel by Roddy Doyle, see Love (Doyle novel).

Love (2003) is the eighth novel by Toni Morrison. Written in Morrison's non-linear style, the novel tells of the lives of several women and their relationships to the late Bill Cosey.

Love

Cover of the first edition
Author	Toni Morrison
Language	English
Genre	African-American literature
Publisher	Alfred A. Knopf
Publication date	2003
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (hardback & paperback)
Pages	208 pp
ISBN	978-0-375-40944-8
OCLC	52039575
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 21
LC Class	PS3563.O8749 L68 2003
Preceded by	Paradise
Followed by	A Mercy

Cosey was a charismatic hotel owner,^[1] and the people around him were affected by his life — even long after his death. The main characters are Christine, his granddaughter and Heed, his widow. The two are the same age and used to be friends but some forty years after Cosey's death they are sworn enemies,^[1] and yet share his mansion. Morrison uses split narrative and jumps back and forth throughout the story, not fully unfolding until the very end. The characters in the novel all have some relation to Bill Cosey.

Similar to the concept of communication between the living and the dead in her 1987 novel Beloved, Morrison introduced a character named Junior; she was the medium to connect the dead Bill Cosey to the world of the living.

The storytelling techniques in Love, namely the split narrative, suggest a recent trend in Morrison's literature that divides the plot among different time periods.

Critical reception

Elaine Showalter, writing in The Guardian, praised it as "a disarmingly compact, unpompous book ... full of quirky, perverse characters and provocative, unfashionable ideas."^[2] In The New York Times, Laura Miller compared Love favorably to some of Morrison's earlier works, such as Beloved and Sula.^[3]