Beloved

Discover Toni Morrison's most iconic work in this Pulitzer-prize winning novel that exemplifies her powerful and important place in contemporary American literature.

'An American masterpiece' AS Byatt

It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love. Told with heart-stopping clarity, melding horror and beauty, Beloved is Toni Morrison's enduring masterpiece.

'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' Margaret Atwood, New York Times

'The literary titan we must never stop learning from' Metro

Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction

**One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

Review:

'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'

'I adored her honesty. I admired the way she occupied her space in the world. I believed her'

'[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'

'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 is the greatest chronicler of the American experience that we have ever known'

'Morrison is, to me, the best writer the English-speaking world has ever seen'

'Morrison's legacy in commemorating slavery's survivors will endure and uplift for centuries to come'

'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'

'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 legacy is total excellence . . . she is magnificent, her emotional intelligence is second to none and her bravery was equal to her artistry'

'Morrison almost single-handedly took American fiction forward in the second half of the twentieth century'

'[Toni Morrison's] irreverence was godly' * Guardian *

A triumph -- Margaret Atwood * New York Times Book Review *

A magnificent achievement... An American masterpiece -- A. S. Byatt * Guardian *

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

Toni Morrison has created a frightening, beautiful and intensely exciting novel about America and its past. I am not able to think of a better one * London Review of Books *

A work of genuine force... Beautifully written * Washington Post *

Toni Morrison makes me believe in God. She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don't seem to come close to explaining her * Guardian *

Prizes: Winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1988 (United States).