Beloved

This book is a longtime favorite of mine. Toni Morrison was a master at blending the personal story and the political, and in this book, she blends the true story of a mother who kills her child to prevent slave catchers from returning the baby to life as a slave.

Morrison’s fictional Sethe is haunted by the ghost of the baby she killed and the memories of her difficult life as a slave. This is one of the novels I return to time after time, both for the beauty of the writing and the portrayal of a mother’s love, guilt,… show more.

This book would have to go on my list of top five novels ever. It’s a work of pure genius that I can re-read over and over.

Morrison’s magical realist rendering of Margaret Garner’s history—a slave’s murder of her child to free her from slavery—enters myth with Beloved’s reincarnation. The novel is about the aftermath of trauma, and the exorcism of Beloved shows Sethe overcoming the shame of the murder through the support of the Black community.

In Paul D’s words: “You are your best thing.” I also have a soft spot in my heart for Denver.

This is one of those books that I re-read periodically, and every time I do, I find something new to love.

I’m a sucker for well-crafted prose, and the language in this book is haunting and beautiful. The novel’s magic is centered in the titular character, who appears first as a ghost and then later as the quiet newcomer who gives her name as Beloved.

I love the way that Morrison’s poetic language and the hazy, dreamlike quality to the storytelling make the reader slow down, put aside the day-to-day “real” world, and accept plot developments like the ghost of… show more.

It feels presumptuous to even try to describe this novel…I can only say that to me, it is a story about a truth so painful that it can only be viewed indirectly and magically, from all the many vantage points its characters (and ghosts) offer.

A spiraling, heartbreaking explosion of a book, brilliantly structured, beautifully written, with a secret at its center. 

A masterpiece that I read while in graduate school, dazzled by Morrison’s artistry.

At the time, I wasn’t aware that I had Black ancestors who’d been enslaved and that my mother was passing for white, which I chronicled in my memoir White Like Her: My Family’s Story of Race and Racial Passing. Reflecting on this gothic novel now, I have a deeper understanding of Sethe and the haunting ravages of slavery. How a house and a person can be possessed by the brutality of the past.  

I first read Beloved at university, doing a combined English Literature and Philosophy degree, and remain as affected by it as I was then. Toni Morrison’s aching prose means this story washes over you like a wave, subsuming you in the lives of the characters.

This is a ghost story, in that protagonist Sethe is visited by a woman who she believes to be the return of her lost daughter, but it is truly a book about the psychological trauma of slavery, and what it means to have a love that is “too thick”, to be forced towards unimaginable actions… show more.

I don’t think I could have written my book had I not read Morrison’s extraordinary, brilliant Beloved.

From her book, I learned how to create the historical setting in which characters live, suffer, love, and die. In her novel I also learned the profound capacity of language to create what seems utterly real, even though it is imagined. And real in very complex, dazzlingly full, amazingly perceptive, penetrating, ways.

Style is a novelist’s presence or even identity on the page, and while, for a writer of fiction, imitating some other writer’ style never really works, and is anyway a… show more.

No writer has gone deeper into birth’s problems and generative possibilities than Toni Morrison. 

Childbirth frames her work from beginning to end; her first novel (The Bluest Eye) begins in a failed pregnancy and her last novel (God Help the Child) ends in a hopeful one. This mid-career novel, perhaps her most celebrated, has at its center one of the most memorable and beautiful birth scenes ever written. As a reader, I encountered that beauty within the fraught context Morrison frames it. 

Morrison depicts birth under duress, a treatment that paradoxically allows her to see in birth… show more.

Set at a time of slavery in the U.S., Sethe, a former slave, makes a terrible – and to her the only - choice to save her girl child from the horrors faced by women in slavery.

Beloved is the daughter who haunts her, and their tale has haunted me ever since.

Some of the images in this book – like the moment when Sethe, the protagonist, shrugs off her dress to reveal the whip scars on her back – will stay with me to the grave.

This novel is brutal and beautiful in equal measure. Anyone who wants to explore the forgotten parts of Black history owes a huge debt to Toni Morrison, and she fills such a heart-wrenching story with such a vivid cast of characters.