100,000+ Books, Games & Puzzles in-stock πŸ‡³πŸ‡Ώ

Overnight NZ-wide Delivery πŸš€ Thank you for supporting our 100% NZ-owned store ❀️

Desdemona

Series: Modern Classics
3.88 goodreads logo

Ratings/reviews counts are updated frequently.

Check link for latest rating.
( 1,192 ratings, 142 reviews)
Brief Description
This is a remarkable, challenging and bravely original work. The Guardian Ripped from the world by her husband's paranoia, Desdemona turns in death towards the memory of Barbary, the North African maid who raised her: together, they explore the contours of death, race, war, love and... Read More
Format: Paperback / softback
$2799
AVAILABLE WITH SUPPLIER Ships from our Auckland warehouse within 4-6 weeks

Found a better price? Request a price match

Originally published: London: Oberon Books, 2012.

A vivid and emotive re-exploration of Shakespeare's Desdemona from Othello, republished in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

This is a remarkable, challenging and bravely original work. The Guardian

Ripped from the world by her husband's paranoia, Desdemona turns in death towards the memory of Barbary, the North African maid who raised her: together, they explore the contours of death, race, war, love and motherhood, in a moving elegy.

Audacious with ambition, Desdemona is Toni Morrison's intimate reimagining of the fourth act of Shakespeare's Othello, mixing monologue with Rokia Traore's lyrical songs to re-examine the Bard's presentation of race and female suffering.

Part-play, part-concert, part-quest into the afterlife, Desdemona is published in Methuen Drama's Modern Classics series, featuring a new introduction by Joyce Green MacDonald.

Series: Modern Classics

View all
  • I am David
    You must get away tonight, the man had told him. David escapes from the concentration camp where he has spent his entire life and flees across Europe. He is utterly alone – who can he trust? What will await him? And all the while, how can he be sure that they won’t catch up with him... This is the remarkable...
    Paperback
    $1999
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • A Raisin in the Sun
    β€œCome to A Raisin in the Sun as you would to any classic. It speaks to us today as it did almost half a century ago.” – Bonnie Greer In South Side Chicago, Walter Lee, a Black chauffeur, dreams of a better life and hopes to use his father's life insurance money to open a liquor store. His mother, who...
    Paperback
    $2499
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Blood Brothers
    A Liverpudlian West Side Story: twin brothers are separated at birth because their mother cannot afford to keep them both. She gives one of them away to wealthy Mrs Lyons, and they grow up as friends, unaware of their fraternity until the inevitable quarrel unleashes a bloodbath. Willy Russell is less concerned with political tub-thumping than with weaving a close-knit...
    Paperback
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Accidental Death of an Anarchist
    In its first two years of production in Italy, Dario Fo's notorious Accidental Death of an Anarchist was seen by over half a million people. It has since been performed all over the world, and has become a classic of twentieth-century drama. A sharp and hilarious satire on police corruption, it concerns the case of an anarchist railway worker who,...
    Paperback
    $2699
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Educating Rita
    Educating Rita, about a working-class Liverpool girl's hunger for education, is simply a marvellous play, painfully funny and passionately serious; a hilarious social documentary; a fairy-tale with a quizzical, half-happy ending. Sunday Times Educating Rita premiered at the RSC Warehouse, London, in June 1980. Voted Best Comedy of 1980, it was subsequently made into a highly successful film with Michael...
    Paperback
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Lieutenant of Inishmore
    Wee Thomas was a friendly cat. He would always say hello to you were you to see him sitting on a wall. (Pause.) He won't be saying hello no more, God bless him. Not with that lump of a brain gone. Who knocked Wee Thomas over on the lonely road on the island of Inishmore, and was it an accident?...
    Paperback
    $2499
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Mother Courage and Her Children
    In this chronicle of the European Thirty Years War, taking place between the years 1624 and 1636, Mother Courage follows the armies back and forth across Europe, selling provisions and liquor from her canteen wagon to whomever she can. One by one she loses her children to the war but will not part with her livelihoodβ€”the wagon. The Berlin production...
    Paperback
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Photograph 51
    Ziegler’s thoughtful, empathetic play brings home with bitter comedy the unlovely male-domination of this world in the 1950s ... glorious." Independent London 1953. Scientists are on the verge of discovering what they call the secret of life: the DNA double helix. Providing the key is driven young physicist Rosalind Franklin. But if the double helix was the breakthrough of the...
    Paperback
    $2499
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?
    Albee’s perversely funny sendup of a standard mid-life crisis drama … dares to suggest that even the most flawed and confused human beings deserve compassionate understanding, and the failure to proffer it is a species of bestiality far more abhorrent than the sexual kind. Variety On his 50th birthday, Martin, a world-famous architect, prepares for a recorded interview by an...
    Paperback
    $2499
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Fear and Misery of the Third Reich
    Also known as The Private Life of the Master Race, this is a sequence of twenty-four realistic sketches showing how "ordinary" life under the Nazis was subtly permeated by suspicion and anxiety. Written in exile in Denmark and first staged in 1938, it was inspired in part by Brecht's recent trip to Moscow where he had been researching tasks for...
    Paperback
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Caucasian Chalk Circle
    Written in exile during the Second World War, the story of Brecht's classic play, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, subverts an ancient Chinese taleβ€”echoed in the Judgement of Solomonβ€”in which two women claim the same child. The message of Brecht's parable is that resources should go to those who will make the best use of them. Thanks to the rascally judge,...
    Paperback
    $2799
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • A Taste Of Honey
    A Taste of Honey became a sensational theatrical success when first produced in London by Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop company. It was made into a highly acclaimed film in 1961. The play is about the adolescent Jo and her relationships with those around herβ€”her irresponsible, roving mother Helen and her mum's newly acquired drunken husband, the black sailor who leaves...
    Paperback
    $2699
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781350428980

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 13 June 2024

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Methuen Drama

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 10.0mm

Width: 128.0mm

Height: 194.0mm

Weight: 78g

Pages: 80

About the Author

Toni Morrison was a Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, editor and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, exquisite language and richly detailed African American characters who are central to their narratives. Among her best-known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Love and A Mercy. Morrison earned a plethora of book-world accolades and honorary degrees, also receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.

Also by Toni Morrison

View all
  • Beloved
    Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times. Discover Toni Morrison's most iconic work in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that exemplifies her powerful and important place in contemporary American literature. 'An American masterpiece' - AS Byatt It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by...
    Paperback
    $2300
    Elsewhere:
    $2600
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Beloved
    A haunting yet beautiful story that moves the reader from start to finish. INCLUDES A READING GUIDE Terrible, unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the farm where she lived as a slave for so many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe's...
    Paperback
    $2400
    Elsewhere:
    $2600
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Bluest Eye
    Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times. Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unlovely and unloved, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes like those of her privileged white...
    Paperback
    $2400
    Elsewhere:
    $2600
    Backorder
    Ships mid September
  • Sula
    A captivating novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved Extravagantly beautiful... Enormously, achingly alive... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter – New York Times As young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's secrets and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood. Then Sula ran away to live...
    Paperback
    $2300
    Elsewhere:
    $2600
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Sula
    Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times. Extravagantly beautiful... Enormously, achingly alive... A howl of love and rage, playful and funny as well as hard and bitter - New York Times As young girls, Nel and Sula shared each other's secrets and dreams in the poor black mid-West of their childhood....
    Paperback
    $2700
    Elsewhere:
    $2899
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Recitatif
    A stunning, relevant short story (the only one Toni Morrison wrote) about race and the relationships that shape our lives, with a new substantial introduction from Zadie Smith. 'Toni Morrison was the lodestar who inspired us' – Bernadine Evaristo Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old, when they were thrown together as roommates in...
    Hardback
    $2400
    Elsewhere:
    $2600
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • The Book of Mean People (20th Anniversary Edition)
    A new edition for a new world of one of literary legend Toni Morrison s first picture books with her son, Slade Morrison. With an afterword by the inimitable Jewell Parker Rhodes."This is a book about mean people. Some mean people are big. Some little people are mean." In Toni Morrison's second illustrated book collaboration with her son Slade, she...
    Hardback
    $3499
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Tar Baby
    The unforgettable novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved. Into a white millionaire's Caribbean mansion comes Jadine. Then there's Son. Jadine is sophisticated, beautiful, a black American graduate of the Sorbonne. Son is a black fugitive from small-town Florida who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, she charts all the nuances of obligation and...
    Paperback
    $2400
    Elsewhere:
    $2600
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Bluest Eye
    The first novel by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved Read the searing first novel from the celebrated author of Beloved, which immerses us in the tragic, torn lives of a poor black family in post-Depression 1940s Ohio. Unloved, unseen, Pecola prays each night for blue eyes. In this way she dreams of becoming beautiful, of becoming someoneβ€”like her white...
    Paperback
    $2400
    Elsewhere:
    $2600
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Song of Solomon
    Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times. Lured South by tales of buried treasure, Milkman embarks on an odyssey back home. As a boy, Milkman was raised beneath the shadow of a status-obsessed father. As a man, he trails in the fiery wake of a friend bent on racial revenge. Now...
    Paperback
    $2800
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Song of Solomon
    Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison is one of the finest novelists of our times. Song of Solomon...profoundly changed my life' - Marlon James Macon 'Milkman' Dead was born shortly after a neighbourhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life, he too will be trying to fly. In...
    Paperback
    $2400
    Elsewhere:
    $2600
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Paradise
    Nobel Prize-winning author of Beloved, Toni Morrison, is one of the finest novelists of our times. Four young women are brutally attacked near an all-black town in rural Oklahoma. The inevitability of this attack, and the attempts to avert it, lie at the heart of Paradise. Spanning the birth of the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, and the counter-culture of the...
    Paperback
    $2400
    Elsewhere:
    $2600
    In Stock
    Ships today

More from Arts & Culture

View all
  • Dylan's Pick
    Bold Types
    A tribute to 32 truly independent bookshops throughout Aotearoa New Zealand, from north of Auckland down to Dunedin, and coast to coast. Jane Ussher's photographs show every bookstore in its unique nature - including behind the counter, smoko rooms, the mess which tells the hardworking story behind the joy of matching books with customers. Jemma Moreira's careful editing has crafted...
    Hardback
    $5999
    Elsewhere:
    $7000
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Disney Moana: The Official Cookbook
    New Release
    Disney Moana: The Official Cookbook
    Embark on a culinary adventure with Moana of Motunui with Pacific recipes inspired by Moana and Moana 2! After a long day of sailing to see how far you’ll go or keeping the demigod Maui out of trouble with Te Fiti, catch a break with the delicious dishes in Moana: The Official Cookbook! Featuring more than 50 recipes spanning the...
    Hardback
    $4499
    Elsewhere:
    $5299
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Did I Ever Tell You This?
    In this unexpected memoir, written in a creative burst of just a few months in 2022, Sam Neill tells the story of how he became one of the world’s most celebrated actors, who has worked with everyone from Meryl Streep to Isabel Adjani, from Jeff Goldblum to Sean Connery, from Steven Spielberg to Jane Campion. By his own account, his...
    Paperback
    $3799
    Elsewhere:
    $4500
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • This Angry Pen of Mine
    This Angry Pen of Mine by Layne Staley invites you to dive into the untold creative world of Layne Staley, the legendary voice behind Alice in Chains. This extraordinary collection showcases his handwritten lyrics, deeply personal poetry, stunning original artwork, rare photos, fan tributes, and so much more. Step into the world of Layne Staley like never before. For the...
    Hardback
    $7299
    Elsewhere:
    $8999
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • They Bloom Because of You
    Bestselling author and Instagram sensation Jessica Urlichs returns with a new collection of beautifully observed poems about the ever-evolving journey of motherhood - the hard, the magic and the fleeting. β€˜A raw and honest read that makes you feel seen and understood in a way that will bring you to tears.’ - Hilary Swank β€˜A book to keep close and...
    Paperback
    $3000
    Elsewhere:
    $3600
    (1)
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Leaves of Grass
    A collectible new Penguin Classics series offers beautiful, slim, clothbound editions of ten favourite poets. In 1855, Walt Whitman published his first collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass. The volume received great praise from leading Transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. This encouragement led to what would become a lifelong project, as Whitman expanded and rewrote the volume until his death...
    Hardback
    $2200
    Elsewhere:
    $2400
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • On Sale
    30% off
    Great Writers and the Cats who Owned Them
    Throughout history, cats and writers have bonded together in a magical combination of comfort, companionship and inspiration. The famous authors featured here range from Samuel Johnson, whose cat Hodge dined on oysters, and Edward Lear, whose charismatic cat Foss was missing half his tail, to Margaret Mitchell, L. M. Montgomery and Dorothy L. Sayers, who rescued her kitten Blitz from...
    Hardback
    $2800
    Usually:
    $3999
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • Beautiful Chaos
    The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller Selected poems from bestselling author and Instagram poet, Jessica Urlichs. 'These words awaken the magic of life by celebrating the ordinary.' - Giovanna Fletcher Motherhood is messy and beautiful, and hard and humbling. We adore our children and sometimes we miss ourselves. Beautiful Chaos is a collection of raw, honest poems about motherhood, capturing everything...
    Paperback
    $2900
    Elsewhere:
    $3500
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • The Odyssey
    Composed at the rosy-fingered dawn of world literature almost three millennia ago, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage and family; about travellers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. This fresh, authoritative translation captures the beauty of this ancient poem as well as the drama of its narrative....
    By Homer
    Paperback
    $2999
    Elsewhere:
    $3599
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • To the Women - The New Collection of Wise Words Every Woman Needs
    THE COMPLETELY UPDATED COLLECTION WITH OVER 70 BRAND NEW POEMS, FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES NO.1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF WILD HOPE AND WORDS TO LIVE BY 'Amazing . . . Donna's words speak to my heart' Davina McCall To the Women is a celebration of the beauty, strength, and joy of being a woman. A love letter to our deep capacity...
    Hardback
    $2999
    Available
    Ships in 4-6 weeks
  • Wreck This Journal: Now in Colour
    The creative journey continues with Wreck This Journal: Now in Colour by Keri Smith, the latest and most vibrant edition of the groundbreaking series that redefined journaling. Celebrating its 10th anniversary, this edition brings the playful destructiveness of the original to life in dazzling full colour, adding a dynamic new dimension to the beloved prompts. Whether you're a seasoned Wreck-er,...
    Paperback
    $2500
    Elsewhere:
    $2800
    In Stock
    Ships today
  • A Thousand Feasts
    THE INSTANT #1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER From award-winning writer Nigel Slater, comes a new and exquisitely written collection of notes, memoir, stories and small moments of joy. 'Nigel Slater’s prose is the rarest delicacy of all: exquisite yet effortless, filled with heart, tenderness, yearning and humour' ELIZABETH DAY For years, Nigel Slater has kept notebooks of curiosities and wonderings, penned...
    Paperback
    $2999
    In Stock
    Ships today

Why buy from us?

Book Hero is not a chain store or big box retailer. We're an independent 100% NZ-owned business on a mission to help more Kiwis rediscover a love of books and reading!

Service & Delivery

Service & Delivery

Our warehouse in Auckland holds over 100,000 books, toys, board games and puzzles in-stock so you're not waiting for your order to arrive from overseas.

Auckland Bookstore

Auckland Bookstore

We're primarily an online store, but for your convenience you can pick up your order for free from our bookstore, which is right next door to our warehouse in Hobsonville.

Our Gifting Service

Our Gifting Service

Books make wonderful thoughtful gifts and we're here to help with gift-wrapping and cards. We can even send your gift directly to your loved one.