Paradise was chosen as an Oprah's Book Club selection for January 1998 and ranked in the BlackBoard Bestsellers List the following August.

When they arrive in the place where they decide to situate their new town, they first built a large and sturdy Oven of brick and iron, even though they are living in wagons and sod shelters.

Returning from service, the twins Deacon and Steward Morgan perceive that not much has changed in the outside world since Haven was founded: there is still rampant colorism and anti-black discrimination.

Preferring to renew the mission begun by their forefathers of self-sufficient isolation from the outside world, in 1949 they lead a group of 15 families out of Haven to establish a new all-black town.

The men take the Oven with them when they leave Haven at the expense of other supplies, and painstakingly rebuild it when they arrive, although in the new town it serves principally a symbolic rather than practical purpose.

Though called "New Haven" in the interim, it is eventually named "Ruby", after the younger sister of the Morgan twins who dies when she is repeatedly refused medical attention because of her race.

Ruby becomes the inverse of the outside world: though whites are hated in an abstract way, light-skinned blacks are specifically discriminated against–if not, ideally, kept out altogether.

Menus’ alcoholism, though publicly attributed to his experiences during the Vietnam War, seems to stem from the shame and despair he has felt ever since he abandoned the light-skinned woman he intended to marry.

Smith, an often insolent young man who angers his uncles by spending time chasing after Gigi, one of the Convent women.

The Reverend Richard Misner, a young upstart recently arrived in town, is deeply invested in the civil rights struggle, models himself after Martin Luther King, and believes Ruby needs to be more open to the changes afoot in the outside world; in turn, the older generations believe he is engendering radicalism and rebelliousness among the town's youth.

The Oven has been taken over as a hangout spot for local youth, and one day it is graffitied with a Black Power fist with red-painted nails.

Eventually, after a series of selectively interpreted "signs", and based on the perception that the Convent is corrupting the town with its amorality and purported witchcraft, Sergeant Person, Wisdom Poole, Arnold and Jeff Fleetwood, Harper and Menus Jury, Steward and Deacon Morgan, and K.D.

The Mother Superior Mary Magna is the administrator of the school and is faithfully served by Consolata, a woman she kidnapped when the latter was an orphan living in destitution.

On one trip into Ruby, Consolata spots Deacon "Deek" Steward, with whom she has a two-month affair that ends when she repulses him with the carnal intensity of her desire.

In order to maintain the Convent and avoid incurring debt, the women begin a burgeoning business from things they produce on their property; in addition to their renowned extra-hot peppers, they also sell relishes, barbecue sauce, pies, and eggs.

Eventually, Sister Roberta moves into a nursing home and Consolata dedicates herself to the care of Mary Magna, who falls into a long illness.

They arrive by accident, in flight from fraught lives (abusive husbands and dead babies; parental betrayal or neglect; abandonment by lovers and violent pasts), but one by one they seem drawn into staying permanently.

Soane, Deek's wife, comes to confront Connie about her affair and ends up becoming her friend, from whom she later receives "tonics" that help ease her mind in the aftermath of her sons’ deaths at war.

Billie Delia stays at the Convent after a violent fight with her mother, who believes, like the rest of the town, that she is wild and promiscuous.

Instead of considering the roots of the conflicts in Ruby (such as the unspoken prejudice against light-skinned blacks, borne of the rejection the original families experienced on their journey to found Haven; or the yearning of the young people to be part of the larger world and participate in the civil rights movement), community leaders decide that the Convent must be destroyed.

A group of nine men – a number mirroring the original, racially pure families that founded Ruby – venture to the Convent under cover of darkness with guns, shooting the women on sight.

Some of the women fight back, injuring Arnold, Jeff Fleetwood, Harper Jury, and Menus, but eventually, the men shoot them down in the field as they escape.

If not for Luther Beauchamp, Pious DuPres, and Deed and Aaron Sands, who corroborate Lone's version, the town might even have proceeded as though it never happened.

Most of all, there is a sensation that the deal brokered by Ruby's founders with God is broken and that death has finally arrived in town: the last chapter takes place at the funeral of Save-Marie, one of Jeff and Sweetie Fleetwood's disabled children.

Connie rests her head in the lap of an older woman from her past, Piedade, who sings to her as they face the ocean in a place called "Paradise."

Mavis is a mother who kills her infant twins Merle and Pearl by suffocation when she leaves them in the car while she goes into a grocery store.

slaps Arnette due to her comments about the boys seeing Gigi walk off the bus, which turns into a town council meeting involving her father and K.D.

On one occasion, as Mavis is heading down the highway to escape her life, "a green cross in the field of white slid from brilliant emergency light into shadow" (28).

However, in Paradise, the oven symbolizes the history of African American women's domestic labor during enslavement until the Jim Crow era.

The men of Haven construct the Oven so that their women would not have to work in the homes of white families where their wives and daughters were subject to sexual abuse and mistreatment.