Beloved begins as a ghost story; its protagonist Sethe is a former slave who, after an attempted escape with her children, killed her infant daughter to save her from a return to slavery. Now Sethe and her surviving daughter are haunted by what they believe to be the child’s ghost. But the haunting unfolds into something stranger and more complicated than the typical ghost story, a manifestation of all the characters’ painful pasts and the ambivalent relationships they have with that history. Unsurprisingly, Beloved can be a heavy reading experience, but it is a deeply worthwhile one.