Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding New York Times bestseller transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.

Morrison's magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning novel--first published in 1987--brings the unimaginable experience of slavery into the literature of today and into the reader's comprehension.

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.

Introduction by A. S. Byatt  in the hardcover edition.

BIO

Toni Morrison is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

REVIEWS

"A masterwork. . . . Wonderful. . . . I can't imagine American literature without it." --John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

"There is something great in Beloved a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you." --The New Yorker

"Compelling . . . . Morrison shakes that brilliant kaleidoscope of hers again, and the story of pain, endurance, poetry and power she is born to tell comes right out." --The Village Voice

[H] Everyman's Library  /  October 17, 2006

1.02" H x 8.22" L x 5.28" W (1.12 lbs) 316 pages

[P] Vintage  /  June 08, 2004

0.9" H x 7.9" L x 5.1" W (0.75 lbs) 352 pages