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WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ZADIE SMITH AND SPECIAL ARCHIVAL MATERIAL
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love. Told with heart-stopping clarity, melding horror and beauty, Beloved is Toni Morrison’s enduring masterpiece.
‘Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours … Beloved is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all’ Margaret Atwood, New York Times
‘An American masterpiece’ A.S. Byatt
‘No other writer in my lifetime, or perhaps ever, has married so completely an understanding of the structures of power with knowledge of the human heart’ Kamila Shamsie
‘I adored her honesty. I admired the way she occupied her space in the world. I believed her’ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
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Toni Morrison's writing style is like poetry in prose format. It's absolutely beautiful, and I've never read another book like it. It also has some of the downsides of poetry, like being really confusing, but if you can puzzle it out, it has really deep meaning. This book is also an inspiration to me as a young writer because it proves that you don't have to follow the "rules" of writing to be a successful author. There's single paragraphs that run on for pages, and Morrison even wrote an entire chapter without punctuation-yet she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction! It's definitely an uncomfortable read, one that will make the reader face the horrible things that happened in the past and their consequences, as well as a confusing timeline and confusing sentences. But! If you're anything like me, it 100% pays off.
In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved. A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by.