Beloved by Toni Morrison
An unflinching look at the impact of slavery on an eighteen-year-old girl.
THEMES:
Racism, Family, Grief + Loss, Coming of Age
An unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. 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 (Bookshop).
Publication Date: September 16, 1987
Audiobook? Yes
Languages? English
Age Range: 13+
Read Time: 6 hours, 10 minutes (at 300 WPM)
ISBN-13: 9781400033416
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Source: Jack Mitchell/Getty Images
Toni Morrison was a Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, editor and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, exquisite language and richly detailed African American characters who are central to their narratives. Among her best-known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Love and A Mercy. Morrison earned a plethora of book-world accolades and honorary degrees, also receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 (Biography).
Watch this 1987 interview where Toni Morrison shares what inspired the novel's theme of a woman's "compulsion to nurture" a child, and why she found some historical accounts of slavery lacking (August 2019, PBS NewsHour)
Dig into Toni Morrison’s novel, "Beloved," which tells the story of a family of formerly enslaved people whose home is haunted by an abusive spirit (January 2021, Ted Ed)