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Beloved

  • Book
  • Sep 16, 1987
  • #HistoricalFiction
Toni Morrison
@ToniMorrrison
(Author)
www.goodreads.com
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3.92/5 350.7k ratings
3 Recommenders
3 Mentions
3 Collections
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohi... Show More

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past.

Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present.

Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

(From Goodreads)

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Number of Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9781400033416

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Kay Harlan @kay__harlan
  • Curated in 10 Essential Works of Fabulist Fiction
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.
Christy Tidwell @christymtidwell · Sep 14, 2014
  • Curated in 20th Century African American & Native American Narrative (Ph.D. reading list)
Eric Karl Anderson @lonesomereader · Aug 18, 2022
  • Curated in 40 Best Books of the Century
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  • Eric Karl Anderson
    • Collection
    40 Best Books of the Century
    40 curations
  • Christy Tidwell
    • Collection
    20th Century African American & Native American Narrative (Ph.D. reading list)
    31 curations
  • Kay Harlan
    • Collection
    10 Essential Works of Fabulist Fiction
    10 curations
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