The Color Purple

Celie, a poor Black girl in the early twentieth-century South, is abused and married off to a man she calls Mister. She writes letters to God, then to her sister Nettie, and slowly discovers solidarity and love through women like Shug Avery and Sofia.

Walker's choice of an epistolary voice gives Celie's story a startling immediacy. Even the grimmest early letters are full of observation and understated humor, and the book never loses its moral clarity or its warmth.

It contains difficult scenes of violence, but the arc is one of healing. This is a deeply humane novel about the power of sisterhood and self-acceptance.