Beloved

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved" is a towering achievement.
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Premio Pulitzer 1988
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Superb. . .A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history. . .Exquisitely told * Cosmopolitan * There is something great in Beloved: a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you * The New Yorker * A work of genuine force. . .Beautifully written * Washington Post * Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature * New York Review of Books * She melds horror and beauty in a story that will disturb the mind forever * Sunday Times * A triumph -- Margaret Atwood * New York Times Book Review * A magnificent achievement...an American masterpiece -- A.S. Byatt * Guardian * A beautiful book and it's beautifully written -- Kit de Waal * Good Housekeeping UK * '[Toni Morrison's] irreverence was godly' * Guardian * 'Morrison almost single-handedly took American fiction forward in the second half of the twentieth century' 'Her legacy is total excellence . . . she is magnificent, her emotional intelligence is second to none and her bravery was equal to her artistry' 'I have never read anyone else like her . . . She was an opener of doors, doors that seemed they might always be shut, doors shut so tight they seemed not to be doors at all' 'Her every word a caress, her every sentence an embrace, her every paragraph, a cupping of her hands around our faces that said: I know you, I see you, we are together' 'Morrison's legacy in commemorating slavery's survivors will endure and uplift for centuries to come' 'Morrison is, to me, the best writer the English-speaking world has ever seen' 'Toni Morrison is the greatest chronicler of the American experience that we have ever known' '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' '[Toni Morrison] led and we followed, and she showed us the beauty of the language, and the power that was unleashed when that beauty was allied to a great heart and a ferocious mind' 'I adored her honesty. I admired the way she occupied her space in the world. I believed her' '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'
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Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She was the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, Paradise and Love. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honour, in 2012 by Barack Obama. Toni Morrison died on 5 August 2019 at the age of eighty-eight.
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