Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. When, at sixteen, Janie is caught kissing shiftless Johnny Taylor, her grandmother swiftly marries her off to an old man with sixty acres. Janie endures two stifling marriages before meeting the man of her dreams – who offers not diamonds, but a packet of flowering seeds. Rediscovered and championed by Alice Walker in the 1970s, Hurston’s lyrical novel of self-discovery is now acclaimed as one of the greatest American classics of the twentieth century. INTRODUCED BY ZADIE SMITH.
