From the acclaimed author Alice Walker – winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize – comes an unprecedented compilation of four decades’ worth of journals that draw an intimate portrait of her development as an artist, intellectual and human rights activist.

In Gathering Blossoms Under Fire, Walker offers a passionate, intimate record of her intellectual, artistic and political development. She also intimately explores – in real time – her thoughts and feelings as a woman, a writer, an African American, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a sister, a friend, a citizen of the world.

In an unvarnished and singular voice, she writes about an astonishing array of events: marching in Mississippi with other foot soldiers of the civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., or ‘the King’ as she called him; her marriage to a Jewish lawyer, partly to defy laws that barred interracial marriage in the 1960s South; an early miscarriage; the birth of her daughter; writing her first novel; the trials and triumphs of the women’s movement; erotic encounters and enduring relationships; the ‘ancestral visits’ that led her to write The Color Purple; winning the Pulitzer Prize; being admired and maligned, in sometimes equal measure, for her work and her activism; burying her mother; and her estrangement from her own daughter. The personal and the political are layered and intertwined in the revealing narrative that emerges from Walker’s journals.

‘I think that The Color Purple was the first book that made me think that I could try to be a writer – or that made me aware that a young black woman from the South could write about the South’
Jesmyn Ward

‘I got the book and read it, in one day, when it came out. And then I went back, the next day, and bought every copy they had’
Oprah Winfrey

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia.

Sisters Celie and Nettie share the pain and struggle of growing up as African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Forced into an abusive marriage, at least Celie can offer Nettie refuge from their violent father in her new home – until Nettie catches the attention of Celie’s husband and is forced to leave and forge her own journey.

Through a series of letters spanning twenty years – first from Celie to God, then between the two sisters – they manage to sustain their hope in each other across time, distance and silence, in a triumph of resilience, bravery and ultimately, love.

Beloved by generations of readers, The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery.

‘One of the most haunting books you could ever wish to read. It is stunning – moving, exciting and wonderful’
Lenny Henry

‘The Color Purple needs no category other than the fact that it is superb’
Rita Mae Brown

‘The great irony about The Color Purple is that it transcends colour. One of the greatest books of all time’
Benjamin Zephaniah

‘A work to stand beside literature of any time and place’
San Francisco Chronicle