Sula by Toni Morrison

'What are the risks of individuality in a determinedly individualistic, yet racially uniform and socially static community?'

Good question. Could be me talking about Exmouth, East Devon today. Could be Elena Ferrante talking about the working-class Naples of her dual heroines Lila and Elena.

It's Toni Morrison, writing in 2005. She is writing a new foreword to her second novel Sula. It was first published in 1973. At the time she was a single mum of two and office worker struggling to pay the rent each month. She got by with help from her friends, her childminders and her parents who took care of her children in the school holidays.She continued to write, was given the professorship of literature at Princeton University and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

Sula tells of Nel and Sula,two girls, growing to womenhood in The Bottom, Medallion in the North of the USA. The story starts in 1919. The Bottom is a country community peopled by black folks. Nel and Sula are two sides of the same women, the homebody, the wild woman, the faithful wife, the wild woman who travels from place to place, from man to man. Friendship, parting, renewal. The true story beneath the gossip and the wedding band and the ringless finger is the loving friendship between two women.

Sula employs a traditional storytelling format in a skilful and individual manner. The way the people speak, how they live their lives, their sometimes astonishing even murderous decisions. Not simply a whodunnit - the mother deliberately killing her grown-up son is a small but relevant incident, not a comedy a tragedy or genre fiction, Sula is a story well told containing multitudes.