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“No one talks about the book,” sighs Toni Morrison, and while she's mildly irked by this turn of events, she understands these are exceptional times. She was in England a few weeks ago, there to do press and public appearances for her exquisite new novel, A Mercy, and all they wanted to hear was a dissection of U.S. racial and presidential politics. But she gave them what they wanted, because she knows this is what it means to be Toni Morrison: to be always and forever the first African-American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, to be the rare writer of novels who receives standing ovations from audiences seeking to be transformed by their encounters with the word made flesh, to be not just an author but an ambassador.

And, this afternoon, being Toni Morrison means to be anchored behind her desk on the Princeton University campus, where she has taught writing for almost 20 years, sipping cold coffee and picking at a crumbly cookie. It is just hours after Barack Obama became president-elect of the United States, and Morrison, 77 years old and operating on little sleep, began the day with a Good Morning America satellite hit and still has another couple of interviews before she can take a breather. Even Nobel laureates have publicity obligations.

But even if people only want to talk about the election, A Mercy is still perfectly positioned to become part of the dialogue. Because, while Barack Obama will soon be America's first “post-racial” president, the novel is what Morrison calls “pre-racial,” and they are, in a way, the same thing.

Set in the last couple of decades of the 17th century, when the U.S. was a half-lawless land of unbound desires whose bounty was being parcelled up according to whims of various foreign kings, A Mercy is an intimate story with epic implications, sung in notes of deep ambivalence.

It begins with Jacob Vaark, a Dutch orphan who lives a primeval version of the American Dream, having scrambling hard enough in the New World to claim a small patch of land. For a time, the dream tentatively blossoms, even after Vaark and Rebekka, his 16-year-old mail-order bride from London, lose all of their natural-born children to illness. They form an ad hoc polyglot family with two indentured male servants and three young women who are also, in their way, orphans: Lina, a native Indian girl who lost her entire village to disease; Sorrow, the sole survivor of a shipwreck; and Florens, an eight-year-old black girl given away by her mother, a slave whose owner cannot meet his financial obligations to Jacob. While Florens sees her transfer to Jacob's care as an act of maternal abandonment, her mother views it as one of terrible, costly mercy.

“For me, the most devastating thing about slavery is – in addition to all the other little horrors – the separation of the family. Breakdown. You don't know where your children are,” notes Morrison.

When Jacob dies of smallpox eight years later, the tenuousness of the family structure is laid bare. And while only one of the young women is black, Jacob's death leaves them all at risk of being de-legitimized.

“These are women, understand: in most cases, illegal without a man,” Morrison explains. “I wanted to separate slavery from race. It's not difference that matters – there are differences that are profound – it's hierarchy. One is ‘better' or ‘lower than.'” She speaks slowly in honeyed tones, emphasizing each word, like a patient professor. “The hierarchy is planted. Sustained. And who does that serve?”

Even on a drizzly day, Morrison's office is a warm space, made brighter by double-height ceilings. A large table to her right is weighed down with manuscripts sent by publishers and students in hopes of feedback. To the left is a black-and-white picture of Morrison as a solemn-faced young girl of about 8, the same age as Florens when her mother gives her away in A Mercy. A clutch of family pictures sits in frames, and a commemorative Nobel poster hangs on the wall behind Morrison, where visitors are reminded of her rare achievement but she is not. The pictures she prefers to see are two striking portraits of disfigured men by the cult photographer Robert Bergman. “They look Renaissance,” says Morrison approvingly. “I wrote a preface for one of his books [A Kind of Rapture, 1998] and finally got up the courage to say, ‘Could you send me a print?' And he did, and I hung it up, but it's too powerful [on its own], you can't have that eating up a room. So I asked him for another.”

The seminar she teaches, called The Foreigners' Home: The Literature of Dispossession, includes novels, “about people who are feeling dispossessed or exiled.” She has three residences: a pied-à-terre in lower Manhattan; a larger home overlooking the Hudson River; and a place here in Princeton, near one of her sons and her grandchildren. And though she jokes about being rootless, shuttling among the homes – “Oh, I have bags! All I do is carry bags! I have a bedroom bag, I have a linen bag – Morrison spends most of the school year in Princeton, where she has been a fixture since 1989.

Mostly, she does her writing up by the Hudson and has it entered into a computer here, where she works on printouts, revising ad nauseam. “I can tell when creative-writing students compose on the computer,” she says with a sly smile. Writing that way is “deceptive because you have this print and you think: That sentence makes sense because it's in this [professional-grade] font! But if you're writing” – by which she means actually writing by hand – “first of all, you may not like the act of writing, so you're not gonna waste time.” Morrison mimes typing. “I'm a very good typist, I can do this forever.” She throws her head back and rolls her eyes to the heavens, while her fingers move with abandon. (If her books aren't known for their humour, she has a comic wit that often flashes in person.) “Each sentence looks great! ‘Oh yeah, I meant that!' No! Writing is revising. If you don't like that ” – she stops herself and unleashes the sort of large, breathy laugh she seems to deploy as a stopgap measure against chastising people.

A Mercy took about five years to write, half of which was taken up by research into the time period. “I got this great book, called Changes in the Land,” about the landscape before the arrival of Europeans. “It has all this stuff! I didn't know: Were there dandelions? What were the fauna, birds, fowl, everything? And how the Europeans changed it. Just knowing what the grasses were!” Only once she knew about the setting could she let her imagination roam freely.

Morrison is often asked about why she sets her books in the past. “Many people complain, almost like [the past] is over there somewhere,” she waves a hand to the middle distance. “But there is no book in the world that doesn't include the past. The detective story starts with a murder and then you have to go back.” (She loves mystery author P.D. James.) Another breathy laugh that suggests she is impatient with this question, but she forges ahead with a deeper answer: She is interested in periods that strike her as being unarticulated. “I keep finding these gaps and silences, and ask: Well, what about this? And suppose this?” She cites two of her novels as examples: “Black towns, who ever heard of those? Paradise, you know? Jazz – that belongs to Mr. Fitzgerald? I don't think so! That's the way it coalesces for me.”

Right now, she's rooting around in the 1950s. “Do you know how many people died in the Korean War? Sixty-eight-thousand – and it's like disappeared from the face of the Earth.” She emits another breathy laugh, then spins out a vivid tableau she's been turning over in her brain lately. It is a simple image, deeply troubling, and encapsulated by a phrase that's only four words long. But after describing the image, she insists it stay off the record; she doesn't know yet if anything will come of it. Though she is, certainly, relieved to have the seed of an idea in her head. “When I have had periods when I didn't have another idea, the melancholy and dread is very deep. Very deep. I'm not … happy.”

There is another reason to keep writing. “My life is so ordinary. I don't ski and swim and stuff. But the real world for me, the exciting world for me, the free world for me, the place I don't have to do anything anybody says – nobody tells me what to do – is in those books. Everything else I do is for my children, my sister, my students, somebody else's expectations.

“In my work, there are only my expectations” – she thumps the desk with her hand – “and I can't let anybody in, even though I am writing for you, hoping that you come in and help me with this book. That's the only way I can do it. It's the liberation for me, it's the freest place I know. You know, the freedom of the mind.”