Beloved
1987 • 362 pages
Ratings107
Average rating4
15
Ratings107
Average rating4
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.
Featured Series
3 primary booksBeloved Trilogy is a 3-book series with 3 primary works first released in 1987 with contributions by Toni Morrison.
Featured Prompt
1,555 booksWhen you think back on every book you've ever read, what are some of your favorites? These can be from any time of your life – books that resonated with you as a kid, ones that shaped your personal...
Reviews with the most likes.
It's generally an engaging book, but the ending is so underwhelming and sort of felt out of place. Disappointing since most of it is brilliant.
Download every one of her books she narrated. Even when the subject matter is dangerous and painful, like Beloved, her voice made me feel that warm, safe, storytelling feeling of having my mother or my elementary school librarian read to me as a child—that magic, storytelling feeling.
This is an unsafe ghost story. It will take you places you might not be ready to go, emotionally and historically. This is a reread, and I still feel worn out upon finishing it. But it is also a Great American Novel, and o say that without hyperbole. I was lucky enough to study it at Yale—my first read. Now I simply come to it the second time as a reader. I am enraptured and heart-rendered.
Wow. What an emotional ride. This is a haunting tale of Construction Era Cincinnati and the lives of former slaves there.
It's been a long time since I've gotten choked up reading fiction, but in one page towards the end, all the intensity (and boy was it intense) culminated in one giant emotional punch. I was engrossed the whole way; Morrison has such a talent for narrative, dialect, magical realism, and complex but relatable characters. Her style is so inimitable, and I loved the way that psychological deluges were complimented with fairly straightforward dialogue, and how the past was revealed slowly through the story-telling of others, too painful to be directly recounted by thos who loved it. I loved it but wow. Need a palate cleanser after that one. Real heavy.
