47 Things to See, Hear, and Do This Fall

The cover of Toni Morrison's new novel cannot stress enough that it is "set, like Beloved, in the American past." And you can see why: Morrison's books since the triumph of Beloved, and the ensuing Nobel Prize, have been curiously uninspiring. A Mercy is, as advertised, set in the American past, though much further into it than Beloved: it takes place in the 1680s. It is the story of Florens, a slave girl who is taken from her mother and sold to a sympathetic farmer named Jacob. In many ways A Mercy follows the template of Beloved — it's about who a daughter who is lost to her mother. But the book's tone is very different. Beloved was a novel of coruscating anger. A Mercy is the work of a mellower Morrison, maybe even a more hopeful one. The 17th century was tainted by slavery, but it was also a freer, more open-minded age, before race had become the toxic, blinding obsession that it is today.

— Lev Grossman