"They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." So begins this visionary work from a storyteller. Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the nobel prize for literature, paradise open..."They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time." So begins this visionary work from a storyteller. Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the nobel prize for literature, paradise opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural oklahoma.