The Color Purple
Subtitle: A Novel
By: by Alice Walker.
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Published: 1982
Place of publication: New York, USA
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 245
ISBN-13: 9780151191536
Copyright date: 1982
Subjects: African American women -- Fiction; Adult child sexual abuse victims -- Fiction; Abused wives -- Fiction; Sisters -- Fiction; Southern States -- Fiction
Genres: Fiction.
Description: In Meridian, Alice Walker wrote the classic novel of the civil rights movement. Her new novel goes back to the period between the World Wars. It tells the story of two sisters: one a missionary in Africa and the other a child-wife living in the South, who sustain their loyalty and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence, in one of the most unusual and moving exchanges in fiction.

The principal voice is that of Celie, who has been raped by the man she believes to be her father, robbed of her two children, and married off to a man she hates. Her sister, Nettie,e escapes the same fate and is befriended by missionaries, man and wife, who have unwittingly adopted Celie's children. Separated for thirty years, the sisters live in ignorance of each other's circumstances. Nettie's letters do not reach Celie; and so great is Celie's sense of shame that she can write only to God. But life for Celie begins to change color when her husband's lover, a remarkable woman named Shug Avery, comes to live with them.

Honest, poignant, laughing, defiant, The Color Purple is a story about heroic lives, love, and the nature of God, and it breaks new ground in fiction with its portrayal of the bonding of women.
(front flap)