17 April 2026

Song of Solomon follows a man named Milkman who has spent his whole life comfortable and a little aimless, weighed down by his family's money and its secrets in roughly equal measure, until a trip south in search of a treasure turns into something closer to a search for his own name and history. Toni Morrison writes about flight, literal and figurative, as both an inheritance and an escape, and the way she builds toward that idea across generations of one family is some of the most beautiful structural work in American fiction. This is a rich, warm, occasionally very funny book about the weight of family myth and the freedom that can come from finally understanding where you're from. Read this when you're thinking about your own family history, the stories that get passed down and the ones that get quietly buried, or when you want a coming-of-age story for a grown man who still has a lot of growing left to do. It's a great book to read if you're looking for something about identity and ancestry that doesn't feel like a lecture, because Morrison's storytelling instincts are so strong that the ideas arrive through character and plot rather than exposition. Give yourself time with the middle section especially, where the past starts to unspool in unexpected directions. By the end, the title's meaning lands with real emotional force, and you'll likely want to sit with the last page for a minute before moving on to anything else.