Unlike Beloved (1987), the first volume in Toni Morrison's loose trilogy of novels charting the history of African Americans – and an instant entrant to the contemporary canon – the third volume, Paradise (1998), has not been given the hagiographic reception the Pulitzer-Prize-winning earlier novel was treated to. Nor, as yet, has it received the critical attention devoted to both Beloved and the second volume, Jazz (1992). Apart from some heavyweight early reviews, especially in the American press (not all favourable, by any means), and a few scrambled “first-off” essays since, a novel which strikes the present – admittedly white, male, English – critic as raising contentious historical and political issues in a most powerful and complex way has been met with relative disregard. Why?