The Colour Purple

Celie is fourteen when she begins writing letters to God, because there is nobody else she is permitted to tell.

In rural Georgia in the early years of the century, she is handed from her stepfather to a husband who wants a housekeeper and a body and nothing more, and she learns to survive by making herself small and silent. Her one certainty is her sister Nettie, clever and beautiful and gone, whose letters from Africa are being kept from her. Then Shug Avery arrives, a blues singer in a red dress, ill and imperious and entirely unashamed of anything she has ever done, and something in Celie that has been folded away for twenty years begins slowly to open. Around them move a cast of women who have each made their own bargain with the men who own their days: Sofia, who refuses to bend and pays for it, and Squeak, who finds her voice late.

Written entirely in letters, Walker's Pulitzer-winning novel moves from cruelty towards something close to joy, and asks what a woman can reclaim once she stops apologising for wanting a life of her own.