Paradise
- Toni Morrison
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The story begins in 1976 in Ruby, an affluent all-black Oklahoma town with a population of a few hundred, and flashes back to the men and women who founded the town after the Civil War.

When the novel opens, a woman lies dead in the front hall of the Convent, a former Catholic retreat just outside Ruby. The town's ‘alpha males’ have driven over and shot her, and then begin hunting down the remaining inhabitants - Connie, Seneca, Grace, Pallas and Mavis are the prey, female refugees who gathered in this safe place. These women have done nothing wrong. Their crime is the fact that they are different, their ‘otherness’, their non-conformity to the unspoken rules that the inhabitants of Ruby follow. Their practices are vaguely occult and vaguely threatening to the acceptable norms at Ruby. The men mistrust them. In short, they are killed because they can be.

Paradise actually begins with the arrival of these women and launches into a series of flashbacks and interwoven stories. As we soon discover, beneath the seemingly “all’s perfect” façade that the townsfolk project, Ruby is deeply fissured by ancestral feuds and financial squabbles. Its only a matter of time before the leading citizens of Ruby look for a scapegoat. And one readily exists: the Convent, an abandoned mansion not far from town--or, more precisely, the four women who occupy it, and whose unattached and unconventional status makes them perfect targets. And so it comes to be that one morning, an armed posse sets out from Ruby for a round of ‘ethical cleansing’. The irony here is that in this ‘all-black’ town created by victims of the Civil War, the oppressed themselves become the oppressors in the end.

Toni Morrison knows how to create fabulous characters. In this book she draws amazing, rich, full-length portraits of the four Convent dwellers as well as their executioners. It makes for a spectacular piece of storytelling.