As young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's dreams and secrets in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live her dreams and Nel got married.

Ten years later Sula returns and no one, least of all Nel, trusts her. Cast as a witch by the people who resent her strength, Sula is a woman of uncompromising power, a wayward force who challenges the smallness of a world that tries to hold her down.

'Extravagantly beautiful... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter' New York Times