beloved book review

Beloved Trilogy #1

Toni morrison.

324 pages, Paperback

First published September 16, 1987

About the author

Ratings & Reviews

What do you think? Rate this book Write a Review

Friends & Following

Community reviews.

"Beloved You are my sister You are my daughter You are my face; you are me I have found you again; you have come back to me You are my beloved You are mine You are mine"

"Sethe," [says Paul D], "me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."

‘ And O my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it and hold it up. and all your inside parts that they'd just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver--love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize. ’

I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved. ROMANS 9:25

What she called the nastiness of life was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children.

“Sethe, if I’m here with you, with Denver, you can go anywhere you want. Jump, if you want to, ’cause I’ll catch you, girl. I’ll catch you ’fore you fall. Go as far inside as you need to, I’ll hold your ankles. Make sure you get back out. […] We can make a life, girl. A life.”

“She left me.” “Aw, girl. Don’t cry.” “She was my best thing.” […] “Sethe,” he says, “me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.” He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.” His holding fingers are holding hers. “Me? Me?”

"Jump, if you want to, ‘cause I’ll catch you, girl. I’ll catch you ‘fore you fall."

"He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers."

"In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don’t love your eyes; they’d just as soon pick em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ’cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it, you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear. What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give you leavins instead. No, they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it. This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved."

Join the discussion

Can't find what you're looking for.

Common Sense Media

Movie & TV reviews for parents

• For Parents
• For Educators
• Our Work and Impact

Or browse by category:

• Get the app
• Movie Reviews
• Best Movie Lists
• Best Movies on Netflix, Disney+, and More

Common Sense Selections for Movies

50 Modern Movies All Kids Should Watch Before They're 12

• Best TV Lists
• Best TV Shows on Netflix, Disney+, and More
• Common Sense Selections for TV
• Video Reviews of TV Shows

Best Kids' Shows on Disney+

Best Kids' TV Shows on Netflix

• Book Reviews
• Best Book Lists
• Common Sense Selections for Books

8 Tips for Getting Kids Hooked on Books

50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12

• Game Reviews
• Best Game Lists

Common Sense Selections for Games

• Video Reviews of Games

Nintendo Switch Games for Family Fun

• Podcast Reviews
• Best Podcast Lists

Common Sense Selections for Podcasts

Parents' Guide to Podcasts

• App Reviews
• Best App Lists

Social Networking for Teens

Gun-Free Action Game Apps

Reviews for AI Apps and Tools

• YouTube Channel Reviews
• YouTube Kids Channels by Topic

Parents' Ultimate Guide to YouTube Kids

YouTube Kids Channels for Gamers

• Preschoolers (2-4)
• Little Kids (5-7)
• Big Kids (8-9)
• Pre-Teens (10-12)
• Teens (13+)
• Screen Time
• Social Media
• Online Safety
• Identity and Community

Explaining the News to Our Kids

• Family Tech Planners
• Digital Skills
• All Articles
• Latino Culture
• Black Voices
• Asian Stories
• Native Narratives
• LGBTQ+ Pride
• Best of Diverse Representation List

Celebrating Black History Month

Movies and TV Shows with Arab Leads

Celebrate Hip-Hop's 50th Anniversary

Common sense media reviewers.

Haunting Pulitzer Prize winner about slavery's impact.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this book.

This book puts human faces on a very difficult per

This book intentionally details disturbing inciden

Author Toni Morrison is the first African American

Several beatings, a strangulation, and a scene in

Characters have sex, including Beloved, who has se

racial slurs and some other swear words

One or two brief scenes of alcohol use by adults.

Parents need to know that this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is on many high school required reading lists because it's a classic that will leave a lasting imprint on readers. It's true that Beloved is the 26th book on the American Library Association's Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books for 2000-2009 and has been…

Educational Value

This book puts human faces on a very difficult period of American history. Though a work of fiction, it will help readers get a better understanding of slavery's injustice and the impact it continued to have on people and their families even after they became free.

Positive Messages

This book intentionally details disturbing incidents to make readers think deeply. Sometimes the best lessons are learned by not glossing over the horrors. The messages in this powerful book bring up a wide variety of sensitive topics, from slavery and racism to school reading lists and censorship. (See our ideas for topics you might want to discuss with your kids.) But the anti-slavery and anti-racism messages and the love of a mother for her children are powerful, important ones for readers.

Positive Role Models

Author Toni Morrison is the first African American to win the Nobel Prize for literature, and this book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her work challenges readers to think about slavery's impact, as well as how racism and injustice continue to shape African-American identity.

Violence & Scariness

Several beatings, a strangulation, and a scene in which a desperate mother murders her own infant with a handsaw rather than have her returned to slavery. There are also scenes of sexual violence, including forced fellatio, a man holding down a nursing woman while another man suckles her breast, and references to men having sex with cattle.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Characters have sex, including Beloved, who has sex with Sethe's lover, Paul D., and becomes pregnant.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

racial slurs and some other swear words (like "goddamn").

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is on many high school required reading lists because it's a classic that will leave a lasting imprint on readers. It's true that Beloved is the 26th book on the American Library Association's Top 100 Banned/Challenged Books for 2000-2009 and has been challenged for its violence, sexuality, and more: It features a gritty infanticide, racial language, horrific sexual assaults, and even references to sex with animals. But teens are mature enough to handle the challenges this book presents. At this age they can decide for themselves what they think about disturbing personal and historical events. Beloved is a beautiful, powerful book that will help all readers learn about the horrors of slavery -- and leave them thinking about what it means to be a strong, heroic, or moral person.

Where to Read

Community reviews.

• Parents say (10)
• Kids say (7)

Based on 10 parent reviews

One of the most beautiful and thought provoking books I ever read

What in the world, what's the story.

Sethe is a formerly enslaved woman who chooses to kill her children rather than allow her family to be captured back into slavery. She succeeds in killing only her second youngest, who later returns to haunt the house in which the family lives -- first in ethereal form and then as a woman calling herself Beloved. The novel takes place primarily in the years after the Civil War, though it often flashes back to the time of slavery. The story moves seamlessly back and forth through time, capturing Sethe's girlhood, her time on the plantation, and the lives of the various secondary characters. When Paul D. arrives and begins helping them see a way past their pain, Beloved's presence becomes all the more vivid.

Is It Any Good?

This a difficult and often gruesome book, but there's a reason it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize: It's a masterful work by one of the best storytellers alive today. In Beloved , Morrison not only will help readers connect to a painful part of American history, but she'll also encourage them to struggle with some difficult subjects, including the possible heroism of a woman who murders her own child.

This is a book whose intention is to disturb: Teen readers might have to grapple a bit with the complex storytelling, as well as with the intense subject matter, but that's sometimes the best way to confront difficult subjects. Parents may want consider reading this classic along with their kids and using our discussion ideas to tackle the difficult topics it raises.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about why this book is on the ALA's banned/challenged books list. What do some people find so threatening? Do you agree with them? The book is meant to be disturbing -- but is that ever a reason to ban a book?

This book provides excellent opportunities to talk about slavery, as well as racism and injustice, even as they exist today. In the context of the book, were the ex-slaves truly "free"?

This book is often on high school and college reading lists -- why does slavery continue to be an essential topic to study?

Book Details

• Author : Toni Morrison
• Genre : Literary Fiction
• Book type : Fiction
• Publisher : Vintage Books
• Publication date : August 1, 1987
• Number of pages : 324
• Last updated : June 16, 2015

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

Our editors recommend.

The Lovely Bones

Into the Wild

Slaughterhouse-Five

Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines

Civil rights books.

Common Sense Media's unbiased ratings are created by expert reviewers and aren't influenced by the product's creators or by any of our funders, affiliates, or partners.

• Australia edition
• International edition
• Europe edition

Toni Morrison's Beloved: ghosts of a brutal past

In the final instalment of her series on the novel, Jane Smiley on why Toni Morrison’s Beloved - a sensational story of slavery and racism in America - has endured

I t is clear from Morrison's dedication ("Sixty Million and more") that she intends to embrace the social document potential of the novel, as, indeed, any novel that treats injustice and its effects must do. This acceptance of the novel's power to shape opinion actually frees her to do anything she wants artistically - novelists who are careful to avoid social questions tend to limit their subjects to personal relationships or aesthetic questions that seem, on the surface, to be perennial, though in fact the novelist is usually simply avoiding the social and economic implications of what he or she is saying. For Morrison and most other writers of the 1980s, though, everything about the novel, from plot to style to characterisation, that had once seemed fairly neutral was seen to be fraught with political implications. Like Tolstoy, who also embraced the novel as a social document and openly used it to express his opinions, Morrison had a theory - a vision of slavery and black/white relations in America - that was in some ways old-fashioned, but still inflammatory and unresolved. The task was to remake the old story in a compelling way, and also to separate her own telling from that of earlier writers, especially Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Beloved is not as easy to read as, say, To Kill a Mockingbird, but it is easy to get used to, and once the reader begins to distinguish among the elements, they fall into place quite clearly. As it opens, Sethe, in her late thirties, is living with her 18-year-old daughter, Denver, in a house that the neighbours avoid because it is haunted. The time is the early 1870s, right after the first wrenching dislocations of the civil war and its aftermath. Sethe and Denver live in an uneasy truce with the ghost until the arrival of Paul D, one of Sethe's fellow slaves on her former plantation in Kentucky. Paul exorcises the ghost, but then a mysterious female stranger shows up. She is 20 years old and strangely unmarked - she has no lines in her palms, for example, and her feet and clothing show no signs of hard travelling. She calls herself "Beloved ", and Sethe and Denver are happy to take her in.

Sethe, Denver, Paul D and every other character in the novel live simultaneously in their present and in their history - the chapters of the novel alternate between the two stories: that of the growing contest between Sethe and Beloved; and that of Sethe's life on the plantation, her escape, and the traumatic events that followed her crossing of the Ohio River and her appearance at the home of her mother-inlaw, Baby Suggs. A crucial, revealing and in some ways impossible to assimilate event takes place about halfway through the novel - Sethe's former owner shows up with some officers to recapture the escapees, and Sethe attempts to kill her children. The two boys and the newborn survive, but she succeeds in slitting the throat of the two-year-old.

Everyone is astonished and appalled by this turn of events (which Morrison discovered in an old newspaper account of the period). Baby Suggs is never the same again; Sethe is shunned by her fellow citizens; Denver grows up isolated and suspicious. Morrison is careful, though, to indicate that while this is a pivotal event in the lives of everyone, it is not the climax, or the worst thing to have happened to Sethe and her loved ones. The climax of the historical narrative is, in fact, the night of the escape, when several of the escapees were hanged and mutilated, while the present-time narrative builds to Denver's decision to separate herself from what is apparently a life-and-death struggle between Sethe and Beloved, and to go out and find work and friends that will help her save herself.

One of the reasons Beloved is a great novel is that it is equally full of sensations and of meaning. Morrison knows exactly what she wants to do and how to do it, and she exploits every aspect of her subject. The characters are complex. Both stories are dramatic but in contrasting ways, and the past and the present constantly modify each other. Neither half of the novel suffers by contrast to the other. Especially worth noting is Morrison's style, which is graphic, evocative and unwhite without veering toward dialect. Even though Morrison rejects realism, using a heightened diction and a lyrical narrative method returning again and again to particular images and events and adding to them so they are more and more fully described, the reader never doubts the reality of what Morrison reports. Just as Sethe recognises Beloved toward the end of the novel, and knows at once that she has known all along who she is, the reader is shocked at the sufferings of the black characters and the brutality of the whites, but knows at once that every torture and cruelty is not only plausible but also representative of many other horrors that go unmentioned in the novel and have gone unmentioned in American history. Harriet Beecher Stowe was accused in her time of exaggerating the cruelties in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and she replied that in fact she whitewashed events to render them publishable. Morrison is her heir, in the sense that she dares to discuss and publish more (though certainly not all) of the truth.

Beloved has held up quite well over the years, despite Morrison being as much a product of her time as any other novelist. The novel seems, for example, more current and compelling than The Unbearable Lightness of Being. One reason for this is that racist attitudes in the United States change very slowly, but another is that Morrison is far more subtle in her exploration of her ideas than Kundera is. Morrison depicts every incident with such concrete expressiveness that the reader takes it in willingly as truth. She is also entirely matter-of-fact in her assertions - equally so about the presence and identity of the ghost as about the character flaws of the whites. No aspect of the novel is presented as speculation, and so to read on, the reader suspends disbelief. In this, Beloved works something like The Trial or The Metamorphosis. With a tale, the reader is asked to suspend disbelief completely and at once. If she can't do it, she won't read on; if she does do it, she is in the mood to accept everything the author asserts as true. The bonus of the tale form, for Morrison, is that she is also tapping into a vital store of black folklore that feeds her style as well as her story.

Beloved is one of the few American novels that take every natural element of the novel form and exploit it thoroughly, but in balance with all the other elements. The result is that it is dense but not long, dramatic but not melodramatic, particular and universal, shocking but reassuring, new but at the same time closely connected to the tradition of the novel, and likely to mould or change a reader's sense of the world.

· 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley is published by Faber at £16.99

• Toni Morrison
• Jane Smiley

More on this story

Toni Morrison remembered: ‘Her irreverence was godly’

Toni Morrison remembered by Édouard Louis: ‘Her laugh was her revenge against the world’

Toni Morrison: a life in pictures

Toni Morrison obituary

Toni Morrison, author and Nobel laureate, dies aged 88

Toni Morrison: farewell to America's greatest writer – we all owe her so much

'Rest, Toni Morrison. You were magnificent': leading writers on the great American author

Toni Morrison’s genius was the inspiration of my youth

'Love is never any better than the lover': Toni Morrison – a life in quotes

Toni Morrison: 'America is going backwards'

Most viewed.

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

by Toni Morrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1987

Morrison traces the shifting shapes of suffering and mythic accommodations, through the shell of psychosis to the core of a...

Morrison's truly majestic fifth novel—strong and intricate in craft; devastating in impact.

Set in post-Civil War Ohio, this is the story of how former slaves, psychically crippled by years of outrage to their bodies and their humanity, attempt to "beat back the past," while the ghosts and wounds of that past ravage the present. The Ohio house where Sethe and her second daughter, 10-year-old Denver, live in 1873 is "spiteful. Full of a [dead] baby's venom." Sethe's mother-in-law, a good woman who preached freedom to slave minds, has died grieving. It was she who nursed Sethe, the runaway—near death with a newborn—and gave her a brief spell of contentment when Sethe was reunited with her two boys and first baby daughter. But the boys have by now run off, scared, and the murdered first daughter "has palsied the house" with rage. Then to the possessed house comes Paul D., one of the "Pauls" who, along with Sethe, had been a slave on the "Sweet Home" plantation under two owners—one "enlightened," one vicious. (But was there much difference between them?) Sethe will honor Paul D.'s humiliated manhood; Paul D. will banish Sethe's ghost, and hear her stories from the past. But the one story she does not tell him will later drive him away—as it drove away her boys, and as it drove away the neighbors. Before he leaves, Paul D. will be baffled and anxious about Sethe's devotion to the strange, scattered and beautiful lost girl, "Beloved." Then, isolated and alone together for years, the three women will cling to one another as mother, daughter, and sister—found at last and redeemed. Finally, the ex-slave community, rebuilding on ashes, will intervene, and Beloved's tortured vision of a mother's love—refracted through a short nightmare life—will end with her death.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1987

ISBN: 9781400033416

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987

LITERARY FICTION

Share your opinion of this book

More by Toni Morrison

BOOK REVIEW

by Toni Morrison

by Toni Morrison edited by David Carrasco Stephanie Paulsell Mara Willard

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

by Mark Z. Danielewski

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

• Member Login
• Library Patron Login

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR

FREE NEWSLETTERS

Search: Title Author Article Search String:

Reviews of Beloved by Toni Morrison

Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

by Toni Morrison

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' Opinion:

• Literary Fiction
• Historical Fiction
• Midwest, USA
• Ind. Mich. Ohio
• 19th Century
• Black Authors
• Strong Women
• War Related

Rate this book

Buy This Book

About this Book

Book summary.

Beloved is Morrison's undisputed masterpiece. It elegantly captures hers trademark touches: elegant prose, fantastical occurrences, striking characters, and racial tension.

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, 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.

I24 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old--as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once--the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, ...

• "Beyond the Book" articles
• Free books to read and review (US only)
• Find books by time period, setting & theme
• Read-alike suggestions by book and author
• Book club discussions
• and much more!
• Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
• More about membership!

Media Reviews

Reader reviews.

Write your own review!

Read-Alikes

• Genres & Themes

If you liked Beloved, try these:

Let Us Descend

by Jesmyn Ward

Published 2024

About this book

More by this author

From Jesmyn Ward—the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow—comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.

The Prophets

by Robert Jones Jr.

Published 2022

A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.

Books with similar themes

Support bookbrowse.

Join our inner reading circle, go ad-free and get way more!

Find out more

BookBrowse Book Club

Members Recommend

The Flower Sisters by Michelle Collins Anderson

From the new Fannie Flagg of the Ozarks, a richly-woven story of family, forgiveness, and reinvention.

Who Said...

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Solve this clue:

and be entered to win..

Your guide to exceptional           books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email.

• Getting Started
• Start a Book Club
• Book Club Ideas/Help▼
• Our Featured Clubs ▼
• Popular Books
• Book Reviews
• Reading Guides
• Blog Home ▼
• Find a Recipe
• About LitCourse
• Course Catalog

Beloved (Morrison)

Beloved   Toni Morrison, 1987 Knopf Doubleday 316 pp. ISBN-13: 9781400033416 Summary Winner, 1987 Pulitizer Prize Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade. Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this 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. ( From the publisher .)

Author Bio   • Aka—Chloe Anthony Wofford • Birth—February 18, 1931 • Where—Lorain, Ohio, USA • Education—B.A., Howard University; M.A.,  Cornell, • Awards—Nobel Prize, 1993, National Book Critics' Circle   Award, 1977; Pulitzer Prize, 1988. • Currently—lives in Princeton, NJ and New York, NY With her incredible string of lyrical, imaginative, and adventurous modern classics Toni Morrison lays claim to being one of America's best novelists. Race issues are at the heart of many of Morrison's most enduring novels, from the ways that white concepts of beauty affect a girl's self image in The Bluest Eye to themes of segregation in Sulu and slavery in her signature work Beloved . Through it all, Morrison relates her tales with lyrical eloquence and spellbinding mystery. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison's unique approach to writing stems from a childhood spent steeped in folklore and mythology. Her family reveled in sharing these often tales, and their commingling of the fantastic and the natural would become a key element in her work when she began penning original tales of her own. The other majorly influential factor in her writing was the racism she experienced firsthand in, as Jet magazine described it, the "mixed and sometimes hostile neighborhood" of Lorain, Ohio. When Morrison was only a toddler, her home was set afire by racists while her family was still inside of it. During times such as these, she found strength in her father, who instilled in her a great sense of dignity. This pride in her cultural background would heavily influence her debut novel. In The Bluest Eye , an eleven-year old black girl named Pecola prays every night for blue eyes, seeing them as the epitome of feminine beauty. She believes these eyes, symbolizing commonly held white concepts of attractiveness, would put an end to her familial woes, an end to her father's excessive drinking and her brother's meandering. They would give her self-esteem and purpose. The Bluest Eye is the first of Toni Morrison's cries for racial pride and it is an auspicious debut told with an eerie poeticism. Morrison next tackled segregation in Sulu , which chronicles the friendship between two women who, much like the author, grew up in a small, segregated village in Ohio. Song of Solomon followed. Arguably her first bona fide classic and certainly her most lyrical work, Song of Solomon breathed with the mythology of Morrison's youth, a veritable modern folktale pivoting on an eccentric whimsically named Milkman Dead who spends his life trying to fly. This is one of Morrison's most breathtaking, most accomplished and fully dimensional novels, a story of powerful convictions told in an unmistakably original manner. In Song of Solomon , Morrison created a distinct world where the supernatural commingles comfortably with the mundane, a setting that would reappear in her masterpiece, Beloved . Beloved is a ghost story quite unlike any other, a tale of guilt and love and the horrendous legacy of slavery. Taking place not long after the end of the Civil War, Beloved finds Sethe, a former slave, being haunted by the daughter she murdered to save the child from being sold into slavery. It is a gut wrenching story that is buoyed by its fantastical plot device and the sheer beauty of Morrison's prose. Beloved so moved Morrison's literary peers that forty-eight of them signed an open letter published in the New York Times demanding she be recognizing for this major effort. Subsequently, the book won her a Pulitzer Prize. A year after publishing her next novel Jazz in 1992, she would become the very first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Towards the end of the century, Morrison's work became increasingly eclectic. She not only published another finely crafted, incendiary novel in Paradise , which systematically tracks the genesis of an act of mob violence, but she also published her first children's book The Big Box . In 2003, she published Love , her first novel in five years, a complex meditation on family and the way one man fuels the obsessions of several women. The following year she assembled a collection of photographs of school children taken during the era of segregation. What makes Remember: The Journey to School Integration so particularly haunting is that Morrison chose to compose dialogue imagining what the subjects of each photo may have been thinking. In 2008, Morrison published A Mercy . That imagination, that willingness to take chances, to examine history through a fresh perspective, is such an integral part of Morrison's craft. She is as vital as any contemporary artist, and her stories may focus on the black American experience, but the eloquence, imaginativeness, and meaningfulness of her writing leaps high over any racial boundaries. Extras • Chloe Anthony Wofford chose to publish her first novel under the name Toni Morrison because she believed that Toni was easier to pronounce than Chloe. Morrison later regretted assuming the nom de plume. • In 1986, the first production of Morrison's sole play Dreaming Emmett was staged. The play was based on the story of Emmett Till, a black teen murdered by racists in 1955. • Morrison's prestigious status is not limited to her revered novels or her multitude of awards. She also holds a chair at Princeton University. ( Author bio from Barnes & Noble .)

Book Reviews   This work well deserves its place in the pantheon of enduring Literature. Possibly the most powerful and imaginative rendering of slavery that exists, Beloved confronts the horror of both its practice and its legacy. While sometimes raw, we are always returned to the redemptive presence of family and community. A LitLovers LitPick ( March '08 ) A work that brings to the darkest corners of American experience the wisdom, and the courage, to know them as they are. New York Review of Books When Toni Morrison was an editor at Random House, she edited The Black Book , an anthology/scrapbook of African American history. While working on the book, she ran across a newspaper article about a woman named Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who killed her children, slitting the throat of one and bashing in the skull of the other, to prevent them from being recaptured by the slave hunters hot on their trail. This upside down story of motherly love expressed through child murder haunted Morrison for many years and finally manifest itself in fictional form in her Pulitzer Prize-winning fifth novel, Beloved. A poetic chronicle of slavery and its aftermath, it describes how that inhuman ordeal forced cruel choices and emotional pain on its victims and gave them memories that would possess them long after they were released from their physical bondage. Morrison uses the story to address a key question for black people then and now: How can we let go of the pain of the past and redeem the sacrifices made in the struggle for freedom? Beloved is both beautiful and elusive: beautiful for its powerful and captivating language, and elusive not just because of its reliance on visions of haints and apparitions, but in its narrative interweaving of the past and present, the physical and the spiritual. For all of its supernatural elements, however, Beloved is most notable as a powerful tribute to the real-life struggles of a generation of black men and women to reconcile the horrors of the past and move on. The spirit of Beloved and the recurring memories of the tribulations Sethe endured on the plantations she lived on and escaped from were both testaments to the tangibly powerful hold that slavery had on her. In the end, she is able to recover her life only by finding within herself and her community the spiritual tools strong enough to exorcise her of this haunting. In this, Sethe's struggle is the struggle of all African Americans: the struggle to redeem ourselves, our families, and our communities from the wreckage of the past even as we honor the sacrifices made for survival. Sacred Fire Mixed with the lyric beauty of the writing, the fury in Morrison's...book is almost palpable...a haunting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath set in rural Ohio in the wake of the Civil War. The brilliantly conceived story...should not be missed.. Publishers Weekly Powerful is too tame a word to describe Toni Morrison's searing new novel of post-Civil War Ohio. Morrison, whose myth-laden storytelling shone in Song of Solomon and other novels, has created an unforgettable world in this novel about ex-slaves haunted by violent memories. Before the war, Sethe, pregnant, sent her children away to their grandmother in Ohio, whose freedom had been paid for by their father. Sethe runs too, but when her "owners'' come to recapture her, she attempts to murder the children, succeeding with one, named Beloved. This murder will (literally) haunt Sethe for the rest of her life and affect everyone around her. A fascinating, grim, relentless story, this important book by a major writer belongs in most libraries. — Ann H. Fisher, Radford Public Library, Va . Library Journal

Discussion Questions   Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips) • Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction • Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Beloved : 1. Consider the extent to which slavery dehumanizes individuals by stripping them of their identity, destroying their ability to conceive of the self. Consider, especially, Paul and how he can't determine whether screams he hears are his or someone else's. How do the other characters reflect self-alienation? 2. Discuss the different roles of the community in betraying and protecting the house at 124. What larger issue might Morrison be suggesting here about community. 3. What does Beloved's appearance represent? What about her behavior? Why does she finally disappear—what drives her departure? And why is the book's title named for her? 4. Talk about the choice Sethe made regarding her children when schoolteacher arrives to take them all back to Sweet Home. Can her actions be justified—are her actions rational or irrational? 5. What does the narrator mean by the warning at the end: this is not a story to pass on." Is he right...or not. ( Questions from LitLovers. Please use, online or off, with attribution. Thanks . ) top of page (summary)

LitLovers © 2024

This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Beloved NYT Review by Margaret Atwood

This page is referenced by:.

Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, ‘Beloved'’ will put them to rest. In three words or less, it's a hair-raiser. - Margaret Atwood 

The occasional excesses of rhetoric (and sentimentality) in ‘Beloved’ may reflect an anxiety that in Morrison that she attributes to her heroine: a need to overfeed and overprotect her children…One of the ironies of the novel is, in fact, that its author hovers possessively around her own symbols and intentions, and so determines too much for the reader—flouting her own central moral principle and challenge. For throughout ‘Beloved,’ Morrison asks us to judge all her characters, black and white, according to the risks they take for their own autonomy and in honoring that of others. - Judith Thurman

[Morrison] treats the past as if it were one of those luminous old scenes painted on dark glass—the scene of a disaster, like the burning of Parliament or the eruption of Krakatoa—and she breaks the glass, and recomposes it in a disjointed and puzzling modern form. As the reader struggles with its fragments and mysteries, he keeps being startled by flashes of his own reflection in them. 

This novel gave me nightmares and yet I sat up late, paradoxically smiling to myself with intense pleasure at the exact beauty of the singing prose. - A.S. Byatt

Toni Morrison has written a rich, mythic novel about slavery and its power to imprison a person long after the chains are gone.” - Cheryl Merser

Morrison's style is both bleak and tender. She writes of the unthinkable without histronics. Her triumph is that through metaphor, dreams and a saving detachment, she melds horror and beauty into a story that will disturb the mind forever. - Penny Perrick

Toni Morrison has constructed her powerful narrative on the cadence of contending voices, the murmur of words thought but unspoken, and the circling motion of memory as it edges slowly but inexorably nearer to the things most deeply buried in oblivion. - Merle Rubin

Toni Morrison has been silent for six years, since the publication of her acclaimed Tar Baby , but her quiet time has been supremely productive. With Beloved, Morrison again flexes her considerable strength in capturing the song of speech, the color of human life and the intimacy of oppression. - Anne Saker 

Beloved by Toni Morrison Book Review Or Just Some Book Thoughts

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is another classic that has taken me a while to come to. Why? As with many revered books, that is a question with a very long answer!

Beloved is obviously in a league all it’s own. I have a lot to learn about READING from it. In all honesty, alot of the book- particularly in the first half- was difficult to fully understand on initial reading. I’m glad I persevered – there is so much about it to note that I’m curious to know what I’d find on re-read

I’m possibly the last person on these internets to read Beloved so I’m not going to re hash plot. If you want that, do have a look here or here . I’m going to write a bit about a few themes and points that struck me

Memory, “Rememory” and shared experience

Morrison’s use and communication of individual memory is what I found most powerful in this novel. There are a few pages where Beloved and Sethe’s combined memories are expressed in tandem. Here, what is being remembered seems to extend before either of their beings . The memories , “rememory” and repetition in this book built an omnipresence that went beyond Beloved, the character or the book. A spirit. This story very is haunting. It is not a book you can read, put down and (ironically) forget.  

The role of memory and personal history in Beloved is so significant both in understanding the relationship between the characters and understanding day to day life in slavery away from a Euro- centric focus. A striking point is that the characters had been at some point been bound by slavery and suffered. The trauma of that history was extremely present in every character and yet the focus is more on how Black people behaved with each other- and loved each other, endured within the limited agency they did have. Good or bad, this is what they did do. These were the individuals in a history we think we know. It is not a story from a white perspective and it is not text book.

An important aspect of memory is that people sharing an experience will have different versions of it. An example being how Sethe, Paul D. and Baby Sugar remembered The Clearing vs how the outsiders like Janey remembered The Clearing and Baby Sugar herself. Even the naming of places/ events in personal memories (The Clearing, The Lowest Of The Low)- emphasised the role of summoning the past in this narrative

A fictional story based on an unforgettable real life character  

I love books sending me off on a Google trail! Beloved is a fictional novel but so much research went into it. Sethe’s character is based on the real life story of Margaret Garner. She was an enslaved African American woman who, with her family, escaped Maplewood Farm (Kentucky)  in 1856, pursuing  freedom. Unfortunately, they were caught by the enslaver and law enforcement. Having suffered slavery herself, Garner killed her two year old daughter rather than have her suffer the same fate.  Morrison was impressed with Garner’s intellect, ferocity and willingness to risk everything for freedom. She took the inspiration to imagine the characters and stories-Toni Morrison wrote this in her foreword to Beloved: 

The historical Margaret Garner is fascinating, but, to a novelist, confining. Too little imaginative space there for my purposes. So I would invent her thoughts, plumb them for a subtext that was historically true in essence, but not strictly factual in order to relate her history to contemporary issues about freedom, responsibility, and women’s “place.” The heroine would represent the unapologetic acceptance of shame and terror; assume the consequences of choosing infanticide; claim her own freedom. The terrain, slavery, was formidable and pathless. (Beloved xvii)

Here’s a link to find out more about Margaret Garner, including the newspaper clippings from the 1850s and differences from Sethe’s character

Another link about the cas e and Toni Morrison’s quotes for context

Toni Morrison wrote so we could read actively 

The reader has to work in this story in order to figure out relationships and histories. A lot of it unravels as you read but if curiosity chases you too, you will probably try and figure it out as you go along. It made me think about how a lot of literature I come across now has the thinking done for you, there’s very little to figure out. That’s not a complaint, I like an easy read sometimes but it’s interesting that a lot of books are not asking us to unravel plot any more. Why is that? Or maybe they are and I  haven’t been reading those books alot?

Beloved is a gothic/ horror story

I probably should have known the genre going in but I didn’t! This has made me wonder what else I’m missing in this genre. 

There is a lot of beautiful writing within such a terrifying  narrative. Some of the prose even sounds poetic. I always appreciate stories with a folklore/mythical  element woven into it which I think Beloved did.  In the characters’ memories and punishments inflicted on enslaved people, it is truly a horror to realise that the characters are remembering depravity that was a matter of routine. 

One thing I did find strange though – why didn’t Sethe always know it was Beloved? It seemed obvious 

There are some books that beg a second read to absorb properly and this was a difficult read. Both literally and psychologically. I think I will have to read it again to appreciate it properly. I do think this probably isn’t the best Morrison to start with, the style and craft is fairly complex. I am very interested explore more of Toni Morrison’s fiction and there is an extensive catalogue for me to get into. What would you recommend first?  

My edition of Beloved is the Plume edition published in 1988 . Lucky to find it secondhand from Crofton Books

2021 New Book Releases- Looking Back At My Anticipated Fiction Titles

7 Books by Black British Writers on my reading list in Jan

Related posts.

Just Like Tomorrow (Kiffe Kiffe Demain) by Faïza Guène – Book Review

Men Don’t Cry by Faïza Guène Translated by Sarah Ardizzone – Book Review

JJ Bola’s The Selfless Act Of Breathing – Book Review

Write a comment cancel reply.

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

• Non Fiction
• Monthly Wrap Ups
• #roughly200- Short books, 200 pages or less
• Black Brit Reading List
• By Ghanaians
• Indie Bookshops
• About/ Contact

Authors & Events

Recommendations

• New & Noteworthy
• Bestsellers
• Popular Series
• The Must-Read Books of 2023
• Popular Books in Spanish
• Coming Soon
• Literary Fiction
• Mystery & Thriller
• Science Fiction
• Spanish Language Fiction
• Biographies & Memoirs
• Spanish Language Nonfiction
• Dark Star Trilogy
• A Joe Pickett Novel
• Penguin Classics
• Award Winners
• The Parenting Book Guide
• Books to Read Before Bed
• Books for Middle Graders
• Trending Series
• Magic Tree House
• The Last Kids on Earth
• Planet Omar
• Beloved Characters
• The World of Eric Carle
• Llama Llama
• Junie B. Jones
• Peter Rabbit
• Board Books
• Picture Books
• Guided Reading Levels
• Middle Grade
• Activity Books
• Trending This Week
• Romantasy Books To Start Reading Now
• Page-Turning Series To Start Now
• Books to Cope With Anxiety
• Short Reads
• Anti-Racist Resources
• Staff Picks
• Memoir & Fiction
• Features & Interviews
• Emma Brodie Interview
• James Ellroy Interview
• Nicola Yoon Interview
• Qian Julie Wang Interview
• Deepak Chopra Essay
• How Can I Get Published?
• For Book Clubs
• Reese's Book Club
• Oprah’s Book Club
• happy place " data-category="popular" data-location="header">Guide: Happy Place
• the last white man " data-category="popular" data-location="header">Guide: The Last White Man
• Authors & Events >
• Our Authors
• Michelle Obama
• Zadie Smith
• Emily Henry
• Amor Towles
• Colson Whitehead
• In Their Own Words
• Qian Julie Wang
• Patrick Radden Keefe
• Phoebe Robinson
• Emma Brodie
• Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Laura Hankin
• Recommendations >
• 21 Books To Help You Learn Something New
• Books To Read if You Love "The Sympathizer"
• Insightful Therapy Books To Read This Year
• Historical Fiction With Female Protagonists
• Best Thrillers of All Time
• Manga and Graphic Novels
• happy place " data-category="recommendations" data-location="header">Start Reading Happy Place
• How to Make Reading a Habit with James Clear
• Why Reading Is Good for Your Health
• 10 Facts About Taylor Swift
• New Releases
• Memoirs Read by the Author
• Our Most Soothing Narrators
• Press Play for Inspiration
• Audiobooks You Just Can't Pause
• Listen With the Whole Family

Look Inside | Reading Guide

Reading Guide

Pulitzer Prize Winner

Introduction by A. S. Byatt

By Toni Morrison

By toni morrison introduction by a. s. byatt, by toni morrison read by toni morrison, part of vintage international, part of everyman's library contemporary classics series, category: literary fiction, category: literary fiction | classic fiction, category: literary fiction | audiobooks.

Jun 08, 2004 | ISBN 9781400033416 | 5-3/16 x 8 --> | ISBN 9781400033416 --> Buy

Oct 22, 2019 | ISBN 9780525659273 | 6-1/4 x 9-1/4 --> | ISBN 9780525659273 --> Buy

Oct 17, 2006 | ISBN 9780307264886 | 5 x 8 --> | ISBN 9780307264886 --> Buy

Aug 12, 1987 | ISBN 9780394535975 | 6-1/4 x 9-1/4 --> | ISBN 9780394535975 --> Buy

Jul 24, 2007 | ISBN 9780307388629 | ISBN 9780307388629 --> Buy

May 16, 2006 | 724 Minutes | ISBN 9780739342138 --> Buy

Buy from Other Retailers:

Jun 08, 2004 | ISBN 9781400033416

Oct 22, 2019 | ISBN 9780525659273

Oct 17, 2006 | ISBN 9780307264886

Aug 12, 1987 | ISBN 9780394535975

Jul 24, 2007 | ISBN 9780307388629

May 16, 2006 | ISBN 9780739342138

724 Minutes

Buy the Audiobook Download:

• audiobooks.com

About Beloved

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. With a new afterword by the author.  This ”brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” ( People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe 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.  “A masterwork…. Wonderful…. I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A spellbinding novel that transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby.  This ”brutally powerful, mesmerizing story” ( People) is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. One of  The Atlantic ’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe 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.  “A masterwork…. Wonderful…. I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past. One of  The Atlantic ’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years 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.

Toni Morrison–author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby –is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story–set in post-Civil War Ohio–of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a child; who has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad: a woman of "iron eyes and backbone to match." Sethe lives in a small house on the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing intruder who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it is alive in all of them. It keeps Denver fearful of straying from the house. It fuels the sadness that has settled into Baby Suggs’ "desolated center where the self that was no self made its home." And to Sethe, the past makes itself heard and felt incessantly: in memories that both haunt and soothe her…in the arrival of Paul D ("There was something blessed in his manner. Women saw him and wanted to weep"), one of her fellow slaves on the farm where she had once been kept…in the vivid and painfully cathartic stories she and Paul D tell each other of their years in captivity, of their glimpses of freedom…and, most powerfully, in the apparition of Beloved, whose eyes are expressionless at their deepest point, whose doomed childhood belongs to the hideous logic of slavery and who, as daughter, sister and seductress, has now come from the "place over there" to claim retribution for what she lost and for what was taken from her. Sethe’s struggle to keep Beloved from gaining full possession of her present–and to throw off the long, dark legacy of her past–is at the center of this profoundly affecting and startling novel. But its intensity and resonance of feeling, and the boldness of its narrative, lift it beyond its particulars so that it speaks to our experience as an entire nation with a past of both abominable and ennobling circumstance. In Beloved, Toni Morrison has given us a great American novel. Toni Morrison was awarded the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Literature for Beloved.

Listen to a sample from Beloved

Also in vintage international.

Also in Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics Series

Also by Toni Morrison

About Toni Morrison

TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels and three essay collections. She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.

Product Details

You may also like.

The Bluest Eye

Love in the Time of Cholera (Illustrated Edition)

White Teeth

The Underground Railroad

The Handmaid’s Tale (Movie Tie-in)

Never Let Me Go

Toni Morrison Box Set

Invisible Man

A Raisin in the Sun

“A masterwork. . . . Wonderful. . . . I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times “A triumph.” —Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review “Toni Morrison’s finest work. . . . [It] sets her apart [and] displays her prodigious talent.” — Chicago Sun-Times “Dazzling. . . . Magical. . . . An extraordinary work.” — The New York Times “A masterpiece. . . . Magnificent. . . . Astounding. . . . Overpowering.” — Newsweek “Brilliant. . . . Resonates from past to present.” — San Francisco Chronicle “A brutally powerful, mesmerizing story. . . . Read it and tremble.” — People “Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure in our national literature.” — New York Review of Books “A work of genuine force. . . . Beautifully written.” — The Washington Post “There is something great in Beloved : a play of human voices, consciously exalted, perversely stressed, yet holding true. It gets you.” — The New Yorker “A magnificent heroine . . . a glorious book.” — The Baltimore Sun “Superb. . . . A profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history. . . . Exquisitely told.” — Cosmopolitan “Magical . . . rich, provocative, extremely satisfying.” — Milwaukee Journal “Beautifully written. . . . Powerful. . . . Toni Morrison has become one of America’s finest novelists.” — The Plain Dealer “Stunning. . . A lasting achievement.” — The Christian Science Monitor “Written with a force rarely seen in contemporary fiction. . . . One feels deep admiration.” — USA Today “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 “A book worth many rereadings.” — Glamour “In her most probing novel, Toni Morrison has demonstrated once again the stunning powers that place her in the first ranks of our living novelists.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Heart-wrenching . . . mesmerizing.” — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Shattering emotional power and impact.” — New York Daily News “A rich, mythical novel . . . a triumph.” — St. Petersburg Times “Powerful . . . voluptuous.” — New York

Anisfield-Wolf Book Award WINNER 1988

Nobel Prize WINNER 1993

Pulitzer Prize WINNER 1988

Robert F. Kennedy Book Award AWARD 1988

Visit other sites in the Penguin Random House Network

Raise kids who love to read

Today's Top Books

Want to know what people are actually reading right now?

An online magazine for today’s home cook

Just for joining you’ll get personalized recommendations on your dashboard daily and features only for members.

Suggestions

• A Streetcar Named Desire
• Much Ado About Nothing
• The Book Thief

Please wait while we process your payment

Reset Password

Your password reset email should arrive shortly..

If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.

Something went wrong

Log in or create account.

•   Be between 8-15 characters.
•   Contain at least one capital letter.
•   Contain at least one number.
•   Be different from your email address.

By signing up you agree to our terms and privacy policy .

Don’t have an account? Subscribe now

Create Your Account

Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial

• Ad-free experience
• Note-taking
• Flashcards & Quizzes
• AP® English Test Prep
• Plus much more

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Already have an account? Log in

Choose Your Plan

Group Discount

$4.99 /month + tax

$24.99 /year + tax

Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan!

Purchasing SparkNotes PLUS for a group?

Get Annual Plans at a discount when you buy 2 or more!

$24.99 $18.74   / subscription + tax

Subtotal $37.48 + tax

Save 25% on 2-49 accounts

Save 30% on 50-99 accounts

Want 100 or more? Contact us for a customized plan.

Payment Details

Payment Summary

SparkNotes Plus

 Change

You'll be billed after your free trial ends.

7-Day Free Trial

Not Applicable

Renews May 10, 2024 May 3, 2024

Discounts (applied to next billing)

SNPLUSROCKS20  |  20% Discount

This is not a valid promo code.

Discount Code (one code per order)

SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan - Group Discount

SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at [email protected] . Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.

For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more!

You’ve successfully purchased a group discount. Your group members can use the joining link below to redeem their group membership. You'll also receive an email with the link.

Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership.

Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Continue to start your free trial.

We're sorry, we could not create your account. SparkNotes PLUS is not available in your country. See what countries we’re in.

There was an error creating your account. Please check your payment details and try again.

Your PLUS subscription has expired

• We’d love to have you back! Renew your subscription to regain access to all of our exclusive, ad-free study tools.
• Renew your subscription to regain access to all of our exclusive, ad-free study tools.
• Go ad-free AND get instant access to grade-boosting study tools!
• Start the school year strong with SparkNotes PLUS!
• Start the school year strong with PLUS!
• Study Guide
• Mastery Quizzes

Toni Morrison

Unlock your free sparknotes plus trial, unlock your free trial.

• Ad-Free experience
• Easy-to-access study notes
• AP® English test prep

Beloved Full Book Summary

Beloved begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Sethe , a former slave, has been living with her eighteen-year-old daughter Denver . Sethe’s mother-in-law, Baby Suggs , lived with them until her death eight years earlier. Just before Baby Suggs’s death, Sethe’s two sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away. Sethe believes they fled because of the malevolent presence of an abusive ghost that has haunted their house at 124 Bluestone Road for years. Denver, however, likes the ghost, which everyone believes to be the spirit of her dead sister.

On the day the novel begins, Paul D , whom Sethe has not seen since they worked together on Mr. Garner’s Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky approximately twenty years earlier, stops by Sethe’s house. His presence resurrects memories that have lain buried in Sethe’s mind for almost two decades. From this point on, the story will unfold on two temporal planes. The present in Cincinnati constitutes one plane, while a series of events that took place around twenty years earlier, mostly in Kentucky, constitutes the other. This latter plane is accessed and described through the fragmented flashbacks of the major characters. Accordingly, we frequently read these flashbacks several times, sometimes from varying perspectives, with each successive narration of an event adding a little more information to the previous ones.

From these fragmented memories, the following story begins to emerge: Sethe, the protagonist, was born in the South to an African mother she never knew. When she is thirteen, she is sold to the Garners, who own Sweet Home and practice a comparatively benevolent kind of slavery. There, the other slaves, who are all men, lust after her but never touch her. Their names are Sixo, Paul D, Paul A, Paul F, and Halle. Sethe chooses to marry Halle, apparently in part because he has proven generous enough to buy his mother’s freedom by hiring himself out on the weekends. Together, Sethe and Halle have two sons, Howard and Buglar, as well as a baby daughter whose name we never learn. When she leaves Sweet Home, Sethe is also pregnant with a fourth child. After the eventual death of the proprietor, Mr. Garner, the widowed Mrs. Garner asks her sadistic, vehemently racist brother-in-law to help her run the farm. He is known to the slaves as schoolteacher, and his oppressive presence makes life on the plantation even more unbearable than it had been before. The slaves decide to run.

Schoolteacher and his nephews anticipate the slaves’ escape, however, and capture Paul D and Sixo. Schoolteacher kills Sixo and brings Paul D back to Sweet Home, where Paul D sees Sethe for what he believes will be the last time. She is still intent on running, having already sent her children ahead to her mother-in-law Baby Suggs’s house in Cincinnati. Invigorated by the recent capture, schoolteacher’s nephews seize Sethe in the barn and violate her, stealing the milk her body is storing for her infant daughter. Unbeknownst to Sethe, Halle is watching the event from a loft above her, where he lies frozen with horror. Afterward, Halle goes mad: Paul D sees him sitting by a churn with butter slathered all over his face. Paul D, meanwhile, is forced to suffer the indignity of wearing an iron bit in his mouth.

When schoolteacher finds out that Sethe has reported his and his nephews’ misdeeds to Mrs. Garner, he has her whipped severely, despite the fact that she is pregnant. Swollen and scarred, Sethe nevertheless runs away, but along the way she collapses from exhaustion in a forest. A white girl, Amy Denver, finds her and nurses her back to health. When Amy later helps Sethe deliver her baby in a boat, Sethe names this second daughter Denver after the girl who helped her. Sethe receives further help from Stamp Paid, who rows her across the Ohio River to Baby Suggs’s house. Baby Suggs cleans Sethe up before allowing her to see her three older children.

Sethe spends twenty-eight wonderful days in Cincinnati, where Baby Suggs serves as an unofficial preacher to the black community. On the last day, however, schoolteacher comes for Sethe to take her and her children back to Sweet Home. Rather than surrender her children to a life of dehumanizing slavery, she flees with them to the woodshed and tries to kill them. Only the third child, her older daughter, dies, her throat having been cut with a handsaw by Sethe. Sethe later arranges for the baby’s headstone to be carved with the word “Beloved.” The sheriff takes Sethe and Denver to jail, but a group of white abolitionists, led by the Bodwins, fights for her release. Sethe returns to the house at 124, where Baby Suggs has sunk into a deep depression. The community shuns the house, and the family continues to live in isolation.

Meanwhile, Paul D has endured torturous experiences in a chain gang in Georgia, where he was sent after trying to kill Brandywine, a slave owner to whom he was sold by schoolteacher. His traumatic experiences have caused him to lock away his memories, emotions, and ability to love in the “tin tobacco box” of his heart. One day, a fortuitous rainstorm allows Paul D and the other chain gang members to escape. He travels northward by following the blossoming spring flowers. Years later, he ends up on Sethe’s porch in Cincinnati.

Paul D’s arrival at 124 commences the series of events taking place in the present time frame. Prior to moving in, Paul D chases the house’s resident ghost away, which makes the already lonely Denver resent him from the start. Sethe and Paul D look forward to a promising future together, until one day, on their way home from a carnival, they encounter a strange young woman sleeping near the steps of 124. Most of the characters believe that the woman—who calls herself Beloved —is the embodied spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter, and the novel provides a wealth of evidence supporting this interpretation. Denver develops an obsessive attachment to Beloved, and Beloved’s attachment to Sethe is equally if not more intense. Paul D and Beloved hate each other, and Beloved controls Paul D by moving him around the house like a rag doll and by seducing him against his will.

When Paul D learns the story of Sethe’s “rough choice”—her infanticide—he leaves 124 and begins sleeping in the basement of the local church. In his absence, Sethe and Beloved’s relationship becomes more intense and exclusive. Beloved grows increasingly abusive, manipulative, and parasitic, and Sethe is obsessed with satisfying Beloved’s demands and making her understand why she murdered her. Worried by the way her mother is wasting away, Denver leaves the premises of 124 for the first time in twelve years in order to seek help from Lady Jones, her former teacher. The community provides the family with food and eventually organizes under the leadership of Ella, a woman who had worked on the Underground Railroad and helped with Sethe’s escape, in order to exorcise Beloved from 124. When they arrive at Sethe’s house, they see Sethe on the porch with Beloved, who stands smiling at them, naked and pregnant. Mr. Bodwin, who has come to 124 to take Denver to her new job, arrives at the house. Mistaking him for schoolteacher, Sethe runs at Mr. Bodwin with an ice pick. She is restrained, but in the confusion Beloved disappears, never to return.

Afterward, Paul D comes back to Sethe, who has retreated to Baby Suggs’s bed to die. Mourning Beloved, Sethe laments, “She was my best thing.” But Paul D replies, “You your best thing, Sethe.” The novel then ends with a warning that “[t]his is not a story to pass on.” The town, and even the residents of 124, have forgotten Beloved “[l]ike an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep.”

Take the Plot Overview Quick Quiz

Every Literary Reference Found in Taylor Swift's Lyrics

The 7 Most Messed-Up Short Stories We All Had to Read in School

Beloved (sparknotes literature guide).

Ace your assignments with our guide to Beloved ! 

Popular pages: Beloved

Full book analysis summary, character list characters, sethe characters, themes literary devices, slavery quotes, full book quick quizzes, take a study break.

QUIZ: Which Greek God Are You?

QUIZ: Which Bennet Sister Are You?

A review on the Beloved novel by Toni Morrison

A critical analysis.

Beloved is a novel written by the Author, Toni Morrison, in 1987. It was published around the same time. The novel has been a success because it has been one of the best-selling in America. It has also drawn attention because it has featured on mainstream media such as the New York Times and Oprah Winfrey’s Show. Additionally, the author artistically and realistically presents a number of rather disturbing life issues. They are, but not limited to, African slavery in America, freedom, identity destruction, masculinity, and the concept of home. Though disturbing, readers can really relate to since they still affect our society today. Clearly, realistic representation in Toni Morrison’s Beloved is something readers look for. The book has good readership and more people should read this book.

Ideas in the Novel

This is not only the most dominant ideas in the novel, but also one of the most memorable aspects of American History. It reflects upon how the African Americans were severely mistreated and robbed of their human identity by their counterparts, the white Americans. But, despite the tough times, the African Americans were very hopeful – some, like Paul D in the novel, went to an extent of eloping from the plantations, others, like Sethe, going further to kill their young ones so they never fall prey to slavery. Halle is another slavery victim who also tries to rescue his mother from slavery. Dehumanization in the novel is symbolized by cattle and how they are generally treated.

This is directly connected to the theme of slavery. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, African American slaves such as Paul D. and Sethe experience dehumanizing slavery in the white men’s plantations. But, they get hopeful that someday they will be independent and live a normal human life. So they decide to escape to achieve their dreams. Halle tries to free his mother from the pangs of slavery. After escaping, Paul D and Sethe meet at 124 Bluestone road and together, they continue enjoying freedom.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved represents the idea of home as a place to host a family unit. This is also directly related to slavery because of the way Africans were separated from their homes. After an episode of slavery at the plantations, Sethe and Paul run away to start their own home in Cincinnati. At some point, Paul runs away from his home and goes back when he feels like.

Identity loss

Losing identity means changing very important aspects of personality such as beliefs, values, and behavior. According to Toni Morrison’s novel, slavery does not just mean physically treating African Americans like animals. It also extends to systems and institutions that came up later including naming of individuals. As African Americans, Paul D, Baby Suggs, Sethe, and Halle, have their names reflecting the loss of their identities. The fact that black people helplessly suffered in the hands of other people only backs up the idea of identity loss.

The history of the novel

Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, is about a black woman, Margaret Garner, who escaped from the pangs of slavery in Kentucky in early 1856. She was headed to Ohio, which was a free state. The main theme of the novel is slavery and involves two main characters, Sethe, and Paul D. The history of this novel is very important because it reflects on the history of the entire American black community. This is a history that is still fresh on their minds. Beloved is a piece of American Literature that brings together both Historical fiction and horror. It is also one of the novels that have successfully presented criticism in an uncensored manner and still remained to be one of the best- selling. Up to date, the novel still attracts a lot of readership and continues to do well.

The problems of the Novel

The main problem presented in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, is not being able to comfortably and openly tell her story. This could be explained by the use of symbolism in the novel. Toni Morrison reflects upon the trouble that black people had while trying to trace their identity and origin and deal with their problems. Therefore, she tries to take people back to those dark days of slavery for better understanding. Therefore, narration especially on such traumatizing ordeals can be as hard for any other author.

Plot of the novel

Sethe runs away to start life at 124 Bluestone Ohio as a cook. While here, she lives with her daughter, Denver, and Baby Suggs, her mother-in-law. Baby Suggs dies leaving Sethe and Denver behind. Inspired by her past experiences, Sethe had murdered Beloved, her daughter of 2 years, to save her from slavery. The baby’s ghost still haunts the house. But, Sethe has sort of made peace with it. Paul D arrives at 124 Bluestone and moves in with Sethe and they start an independent life together. They are so in love that Denver, who is now big enough, gets jealous. After some time, the haunting by baby Beloved’s ends. But, a woman by the name Beloved arrives at their home in 124. This startles everyone, especially Sethe, since she had murdered her daughter, who also went by the name Beloved. Both Paul and Sethe are left with no choice but to allow Beloved to stay.

This news spreads like bush fire. Her stay is characterized by financial times so hard the neighbors join hands to offer help. Denver gets a job. One way when going to work, Sethe mistakes her boss for her slave master. She gets mad and attacks him. She is stopped by Denver and other women, leading to Beloved running away forever. Sethe gets mentally ill. Paul D comes back and Sethe gets better. Denver focuses on getting a college education. From then on, the quality of life of black people at 124 gets better.

Description of Main Characters

Noble – loves the fact that she is black.

Loving – Opinions are different, but it was out of love that Sethe saved her child from the cruelty that comes with slavery.

Morally upright – She did not like the idea of murder as protection from slavery.

Self-driven – she is focused on having a better life for her family and herself. She gets a good job and works towards going to college.

Understanding – she doesn’t blame her mother for killing Beloved.

This refers to the baby, the ghost, and the woman.

Baby-like – Ribbons and bright clothes excite the woman just as much as a baby would be.

Loving – he falls in love with Sethe and they live together.

In a nutshell, the impact of Toni Morrison’s Beloved cannot be understated. It is worth reading for a better understanding of our society today.

Recent Posts

• Literary analysis of “A Retrieved Reformation” by O. Henry
• Literary analysis of “The Cop and the Anthem” by O. Henry
• Literary analysis of “The Ransom of Red Chief” by O. Henry
• Literary analysis of “The Gift of the Magi” by O. Henry
• Literary analysis of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde
• Albert Camus
• Arthur Rimbaud
• Bertolt Brecht
• Charles Baudelaire
• Charles Dickens
• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Chinua Achebe
• Daniel Defoe
• Emily Brontë
• Ernest Hemingway
• Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann
• Francis Scott Fitzgerald
• Franz Kafka
• Frederic Stendhal
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Gustave Flaubert
• Guy de Maupassant
• Hans Christian Andersen
• Henry Fielding
• Honore de Balzac
• Jane Austen
• Jean-Paul Sartre
• John Collier
• John Steinbeck
• Jonathan Swift
• Kurt Vonnegut
• Leo Tolstoy
• Oliver Goldsmith
• Oscar Wilde
• Paul Verlaine
• Prosper Mérimée
• Rainer Maria Rilke
• Ralph Ellison
• Ray Bradbury
• Richard Bach
• Richard Wright
• Robert Burns
• Samuel Richardson
• Sylvia Plath
• Theodore Dreiser
• Thomas Mann
• Toni Morrison
• Victor Hugo
• Virginia Woolf
• Walt Whitman
• William Golding
• William Shakespeare

• Non-Fiction
• Author’s Corner
• Reader’s Corner
• Writing Guide
• Book Marketing Services
• Write for us

Book Review: Beloved by Toni Morrison

Author: Toni Morrison

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

Genre: Historical Fiction, Magical Realism

First Publication: 1987

Language:  English

Major Characters: Baby Suggs, Sethe, Beloved, Paul D Garner, Denver

Setting Place: The outskirts of Cincinnati, Ohio in the years just before (1855) and directly following (1873) the Civil War; flashbacks to the Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky

Theme: Slavery, Motherhood, Storytelling, Memory, and the Past, Community

Narrator: Third person omniscient, with first-person passages from various points of view

Book Summary: Beloved by Toni Morrison

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

Sethe 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. Her 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 by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.

Beloved by Toni Morrison is a beautiful, haunting story that is set around the time following the slavery emancipation declaration. It’s mysterious and supernatural , as well as being a love story, a tale of horror, forgiveness, loss and confusion. It’s very poetic and lyrical, full of metaphors and powerful imagery.

Beloved by Toni Morrison tells the story of Sethe, a runaway slave who has left her home in the South but is still living in the past. Her deceased two year old baby supposedly haunts 124, the house in which she and her daughter Denver live. Later, we find out the awful way in which the baby died and that makes the story even more tragic.

“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”

The house is an ominous character in Beloved by Toni Morrison; it had a life of its own. I felt the hopelessness of Sethe and Denver who had no place else to go.

The love story in Beloved by Toni Morrison is a different kind of love story, a love story that involves a couple, Sethe and Paul D, who were once slaves. How can people move on from being slaves to being in free relationships? As slaves they became accustomed to their loved ones, their parents, children and lovers being sold or running away. The past has left scar marks like the scars in the shape of a chokeberry tree on Sethe’s back.

“Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.”

For Toni Morrison this is part of her personal history, and she makes herself the voice of this legion of ghosts whose stories some people would like to remain buried and forgotten. With her artistic sensibilities, she takes a real case of a woman pushed beyond the limits of endurance by the system ( Margaret Garner ) and makes it a poem of pain and redemption, of the awakening of individual conscience and of the sense of belonging to a community of the oppressed.

More on this topic

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Sign me up for the newsletter!

Readers also enjoyed

Overcoming anxiety and depression by lillyin love, the vanishing half by brit bennett, the atlas six by olivie blake, people we meet on vacation by emily henry, the house in the cerulean sea by tj klune.

Popular stories

One day, life will change by saranya umakanthan, most famous fictional detectives from literature, the complete list of the booker prize winner books, book marketing and promotion services.

We provide genuine and custom-tailored book marketing services and promotion strategies. Our services include book reviews and social media promotion across all possible platforms, which will help you in showcasing the books, sample chapters, author interviews, posters, banners, and other promotional materials. In addition to book reviews and author interviews, we also provide social media campaigning in the form of contests, events, quizzes, and giveaways, as well as sharing graphics and book covers. Our book marketing services are very efficient, and we provide them at the most competitive price.

The Book Marketing and Promotion Plan that we provide covers a variety of different services. You have the option of either choosing the whole plan or customizing it by selecting and combining one or more of the services that we provide. The following is a list of the services that we provide for the marketing and promotion of books.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews have direct impact on readers while they are choosing their next book to read. When they are purchasing book, most readers prefer the books with good reviews. We’ll review your book and post reviews on Amazon, Flipkart, Goodreads and on our Blogs and social-media channels.

Author Interviews

We’ll interview the author and post those questions and answers on blogs and social medias so that readers get to know about author and his book. This will make author famous along with his book among the reading community.

Social Media Promotion

We have more than 170K followers on our social media channels who are interested in books and reading. We’ll create and publish different posts about book and author on our social media platforms.

Social Media Set up

Social Media is a significant tool to reaching out your readers and make them aware of your work. We’ll help you to setup and manage various social media profiles and fan pages for your book.

We’ll provide you our social media marketing guide, using which you may take advantage of these social media platforms to create and engage your fan base.

Website Creation

One of the most effective and long-term strategies to increase your book sales is to create your own website. Author website is must have tool for authors today and it doesn’t just help you to promote book but also helps you to engage with your potential readers. Our full featured author website, with blog, social media integration and other cool features, is the best marketing tool you can have. You can list each of your titles and link them to buy from various online stores.

Google / Facebook / Youtube Adverts

We can help you in creating ad on Google, Facebook and Youtube to reach your target audience using specific keywords and categories relevant to your book.

With our help you can narrow down your ads to the exact target audience for your book.

For more details mail us at [email protected]

The Bookish Elf is your single, trusted, daily source for all the news, ideas and richness of literary life. The Bookish Elf is a site you can rely on for book reviews, author interviews, book recommendations, and all things books. Contact us: [email protected]

Quick Links

• Privacy Policy

Recent Posts

E-reader vs. paperbacks: the ultimate showdown for bookworms, top 6 books about cricket for every enthusiast, a man eater in kasan kadu by balamurugan k a.

Toni Morrison

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

On the edge of Cincinnati, in 1873 just after the end of the Civil War, there is a house numbered 124 that is haunted by the presence of a dead child. A former slave named Sethe has lived in the house, with its ghost, for 18 years. Sethe lives at 124 with her daughter Denver . Her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs , died eight years previously after languishing for years with exhaustion and seeming overwhelming sadness. And her two sons, Howard and Buglar , ran away from the haunted home just before Baby Suggs’ death.

Paul D , a former slave who used to work on the same plantation, called Sweet Home, as Sethe, arrives at 124 and moves in, making a kind of family with Denver and Sethe. Paul D awakens painful memories for Sethe and Denver is jealous of the attention and affection that Sethe gives to him. But just as Denver is getting used to the new familial arrangement, a strange woman appears at the house. She calls herself Beloved and says that she doesn’t know who she is or where she is from.

Beloved asks Sethe many questions about her past and somehow seems to know about things only Sethe knew, such as about a pair of earrings Sethe received as a gift from the wife of her former master. Denver loves having Beloved around the house and eagerly tells her about the miracle of her own birth: Sethe escaped from Sweet Home while pregnant with Denver and almost died of hunger and exhaustion while trying to make it to Ohio. But a white woman named Amy Denver found Sethe, cared for her, and helped her get to the Ohio River , where she gave birth to Denver. Sethe named Denver after the kind white woman.

Paul D recalls his experience working on a chain gang. He and the other slaves eventually escaped together and had their chains cut by a group of Cherokee. Paul D wandered north and stayed with a kind woman in Delaware for some time, but he was unable to settle. He felt an urge to wander and did so for years before coming to 124.

Missing Baby Suggs, Sethe takes Beloved and Denver to the clearing in the woods where Baby Suggs used to have spiritual gatherings before she fell into her exhausted state. Sethe wishes that Baby Suggs were there to rub her neck and suddenly she feels other-worldly fingers massaging her neck. But then the fingers begin to choke her until they finally let go. Denver thinks that Beloved is somehow behind the choking, but Beloved denies it.

Beloved gradually and mysteriously forces Paul D out of the house by making him restless, so that he ends up sleeping outside in the cold house. When he is sleeping outside in the cold house one night, she persuades him to sleep with her and stirs up his painful memories. Beloved tells Denver that she wants Paul D out of 124.

The novel moves back in time to follow Baby Suggs as she waits for Sethe and her son Halle (Sethe’s husband). Sethe has snuck her children out of Sweet Home and sent them ahead to 124, and she and Halle are supposed to escape together and come to the house. Halle never arrives, but Sethe does, and Baby Suggs is happy to have at least Sethe and her children reunited. She hosts a grand celebration for the neighboring community and her meager stores of food miraculously furnish a huge feast for ninety people. After the celebration, she feels uneasy, and realizes that she has offended the community with an excessive display of joy and pride. She senses that something bad is coming as a consequence.

Soon after the celebration, four horsemen come to 124: Schoolteacher (who became the owner of Sweet Home after the kinder original master died), his nephew, a slave catcher, and a sheriff. They have come to take Sethe and her children back to Sweet Home to work as slaves. The offended community does not warn Sethe or Baby Suggs, and when Sethe sees Schoolteacher coming, she gathers her children and runs to a shed. When the four horsemen find her, she has killed one child with a saw and is ready to kill her other children. Schoolteacher decides that she is crazy and not worth bringing back to work. The sheriff takes Sethe off to jail.

Back in the present, a former slave named Stamp Paid (who helped Sethe escape to 124 eighteen years ago) tells Paul D about Sethe’s killing her own child. Paul D confronts Sethe about it, and then leaves 124. Feeling guilty for causing Paul D to leave Sethe, Stamp Paid goes to 124 to talk to Sethe. But she does not come to the door. Stamp Paid hears strange voices from the house and sees Beloved through a window.

Within the house, Beloved causes Sethe to remember more and more of her painful past. The novel follows Sethe’s stream of consciousness as Sethe maintains that her killing her child was an act of love. Sethe believes that Beloved is the returned spirit of her dead child. The novel then follows the thoughts of Denver and Beloved. In a series of vivid but fragmented recollections, Beloved remembers being taken on a ship from Africa to the United States, the "middle passage" of the Atlantic slave trade.

Sethe begins to get weaker and weaker, falling under the sway of Beloved, whose every whim Sethe obeys. Denver ventures out of the house in search of work, to try to get food and provide for the household. She goes to the house of the Bodwins , who once helped Baby Suggs settle at 124, and tells their maid Janey about Beloved and the situation at 124. The community rallies together to supply food to 124.

As news spreads of Beloved’s strange presence at 124, a group of women join together to rescue Sethe and Denver from her. They gather around 124 and break into song, in a kind of exorcism. Mr. Bodwin approaches the house and Sethe mistakes him for Schoolteacher. Crazed, she tries to attack him but is restrained by Denver and other women. Beloved disappears.

After Beloved’s departure, 124 seems to become a normal household. Sethe has mostly lost her mind, but Denver is working and learning, hoping one day to attend college. Paul D returns to 124 and promises to always care for Sethe. The inhabitants of 124 and the surrounding community gradually forget about Beloved entirely, even those who saw and talked to her.

• Biggest New Books
• Non-Fiction
• All Categories
• First Readers Club Daily Giveaway
• How It Works

Margaret Atwood's 1987 Review of Beloved

Atwood's 1987 new york times review of toni morrison's pulitzer prize-winning novel.

• Share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

“…another triumph. Indeed, Ms. Morrison’s versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest. In three words or less, it’s a hair-raiser … Through the different voices and memories of the book, including that of Sethe’s mother, a survivor of the infamous slave-ship crossing, we experience American slavery as it was lived by those who were its objects of exchange, both at its best—which wasn’t very good—and at its worst, which was as bad as can be imagined. Above all, it is seen as one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised. The slaves are motherless, fatherless, deprived of their mates, their children, their kin. It is a world in which people suddenly vanish and are never seen again, not through accident or covert operation or terrorism, but as a matter of everyday legal policy …  Beloved is written in an antiminimalist prose that is by turns rich, graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous, colloquial and very much to the point.”

–Margaret Atwood, The New York Times , September 13, 1987

Share this:

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)

Get the Book Marks Bulletin

Email address:

• Categories Fiction Fantasy Graphic Novels Historical Horror Literary Literature in Translation Mystery, Crime, & Thriller Poetry Romance Speculative Story Collections Non-Fiction Art Biography Criticism Culture Essays Film & TV Graphic Nonfiction Health History Investigative Journalism Memoir Music Nature Politics Religion Science Social Sciences Sports Technology Travel True Crime

May 3, 2024

• The ethics of rare book collecting
• Jonathan Lethem reflects on his friendship with Paul Auster
• Personal accounts of depression and mania, from Lord Byron to Anne Sexton

नई संसद : परंतु क्या महिलाओं के…

When will the feminist movement become intersectional, breaking barriers – the inspirational journey of…, the future of socially responsible investing: why…, climate change’s gendered impact: stories of women…, bharat mata : not an idea supported…, where are the women, महिलाओं को क्यों नहीं आने दिया जाता…, power impacts consent, “it is patriarchal and sexist to suggest…, book review ‘beloved’ by toni morrison.

By Arthita Banerjee

Toni Morrison was a writer extraordinaire, her impact on people’s lives went far beyond the page. She was the very first black woman to be awarded the Nobel prize for Literature, laying the groundwork for generations to come. We all stand tall on her shoulders, to say the least.

Her best known work, the ‘ Beloved’ , moves in terrains nobody has dared explore before. 

When you think of a story addressing, revisiting slavery- all it normally does is tread along the sidelines, use grisly, graphic tales of horrors in an attempt to educate, by invoking a sense of pity.

Morrison, however doesn’t want you to look at the black experience through a monochromatic lens. She implores you to look for the complex shades of grey, even in the most enduring and trying times. While you maybe disgusted by the actions of the characters but you are never to see them as less than people, puppeteered by the slave masters and a mere product of the cotton plantations.  

It’s truly an extraordinary task to write a review for Toni’s magnum opus but if I must mention, it’s an equally daunting task trying to take it all in the first time you read it – her nurtured, her nemesis, the beloved. 

Morrison demands you really read her book. It is of little consequence that you may be familiar with the writing style of a Faulkner or a García Márquez, when you sit down with Beloved, you need to have a little artistic interpretation of your own, as a reader, otherwise it ain’t cutting ice with her writing. 

The book is definitely not your run-of-the-mill linear tale, there is no beginning and no end to it, just juxtapositions of the horrors of the past, told through flashbacks, memories and dreams, all effortlessly blending into the present – a constant reminder of how alive the past is. The narration and the structure of the book is also compounded by an ever-switching point of view of the characters. Even the dead ones, sometimes, have their bit to say.

Beloved, is a tapestry of the imperative, very distinctive black experience that’s hard to look in the eye. Distinctive, because the characters have a voice of their own, devastatingly enough, not a choice, but you learn the complexities in their own words, through their own nightmares, their doings as well as their undoings. Her writing is almost lyrical, poetry flowing like prose and her words, definitely incomparable. By her storytelling, she manages to elegantly dignify even the indignation suffered by her people.

Set in the mid 1800s, the book is based on the real life account of Margaret Garner, a fugitive slave on a Kentucky plantation, who, in an attempt to escape the slave catchers along with the letter and the spirit of the unforgiving law- the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and out of utter desperation, does the unthinkable. 

The great American painter, Thomas Satterwhite Noble, historically represents the very story in his painting ‘ The Modern Medea ’. A wood engraving of the art-piece can be found at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Margaret’s story, told through Morrison’s Sethe, explores the physical, emotional and to an extent spiritual devastation wrought by slavery.

The central character in the book is Sethe, and the book opens with the words, “Sth, I know that woman.” Several linguists argue that “Sth” is the sound of a woman grinding her teeth, it’s metaphorically conclusive for her actions which you are left free to judge but it’s sure to alter your perception, through her journey. 

The story follows the residents of house 124, a black family dismantled by their former enslavement, some years after the end of the Civil War. Sethe, along with the two young boys of the family, her mother-in-law Baby Suggs, and her daughter Denver live haunted by a raucous, and at times violent, spirit of a baby. It works its way into driving her family out, one after the other and ultimately her own community ends up isolating her. 

The story seams into gothic fiction, but it’s unlike any you have read before. It focuses on the haunting of the soul, that things cannot be unseen, unfelt or unremembered. The baby ghost is Sethe’s own child. 

Toni was disappointed that the book wasn’t “welcomed into the horror genre, when it is in fact a classic of horror.” However, as a reader I thought that the terror that is felt in the book is hardly about the ghost itself. It has so little to do with the supernatural and everything to do with the reality of the severe dehumanization of an entire people. It’s the horror of making the reader acknowledge that slavery existed, and Toni banging the ceremonial gavel with the order that it should and it must, haunt us all.

First transgender artiste to receive a Padma Shri, Narthaki Nataraj now gets appointed in TN Advisory Committee

Roadmap for a brand new wave of feminism.

Editorial Team

Related posts, devaki jain’s memoir : the brass notebook, book review – the handmaid’s tale, the mother of us all.

JAUNTED BY THEIR NIGHTMARES Date: September 13, 1987, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 3; Book Review Desk Byline: By MARGARET ATWOOD; Margaret Atwood is the author of ''The Handmaid's Tale,'' ''Bluebeard's Egg'' and the forthcoming ''Selected Poems II.'' Lead: LEAD: BELOVED By Toni Morrison. 275 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95. Text: BELOVED By Toni Morrison. 275 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $18.95. ''BELOVED'' is Toni Morrison's fifth novel, and another triumph. Indeed, Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, ''Beloved'' will put them to rest. In three words or less, it's a hair-raiser. In ''Beloved,'' Ms. Morrison turns away from the contemporary scene that has been her concern of late. This new novel is set after the end of the Civil War, during the period of so-called Reconstruction, when a great deal of random violence was let loose upon blacks, both the slaves freed by Emancipation and others who had been given or had bought their freedom earlier. But there are flashbacks to a more distant period, when slavery was still a going concern in the South and the seeds for the bizarre and calamitous events of the novel were sown. The setting is similarly divided: the countryside near Cincinnati, where the central characters have ended up, and a slave-holding plantation in Kentucky, ironically named Sweet Home, from which they fled 18 years before the novel opens. There are many stories and voices in this novel, but the central one belongs to Sethe, a woman in her mid-30's, who is living in an Ohio farmhouse with her daughter, Denver, and her mother-in-law Baby Suggs. ''Beloved'' is such a unified novel that it's difficult to discuss it without giving away the plot, but it must be said at the outset that it is, among other things, a ghost story, for the farmhouse is also home to a sad, malicious and angry ghost, the spirit of Sethe's baby daughter, who had her throat cut under appalling circumstances 18 years before, when she was 2. We never know this child's full name, but we - and Sethe - think of her as Beloved, because that is what is on her tombstone. Sethe wanted ''Dearly Beloved,'' from the funeral service, but had only enough strength to pay for one word. Payment was 10 minutes of sex with the tombstone engraver. This act, which is recounted early in the novel, is a keynote for the whole book: in the world of slavery and poverty, where human beings are merchandise, everything has its price, and price is tyrannical. ''Who would have thought that a little old baby could harbor so much rage?,'' Sethe thinks, but it does; breaking mirrors, making tiny handprints in cake icing, smashing dishes and manifesting itself in pools of blood-red light. As the novel opens, the ghost is in full possession of the house, having driven away Sethe's two young sons. Old Baby Suggs, after a lifetime of slavery and a brief respite of freedom - purchased for her by the Sunday labor of her son Halle, Sethe's husband -has given up and died. Sethe lives with her memories, almost all of them bad. Denver, her teen-age daughter, courts the baby ghost because, since her family has been ostracized by the neighbors, she doesn't have anyone else to play with. The supernatural element is treated, not in an ''Amityville Horror,'' watch-me-make-your-flesh-creep mode, but with magnificent practicality, like the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw in ''Wuthering Heights.'' All the main characters in the book believe in ghosts, so it's merely natural for this one to be there. As Baby Suggs says, ''Not a house in the country ain't packed to its rafters with some dead Negro's grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby. My husband's spirit was to come back in here? or yours? Don't talk to me. You lucky.'' In fact, Sethe would rather have the ghost there than not there. It is, after all, her adored child, and any sign of it is better, for her, than nothing. This grotesque domestic equilibrium is disturbed by the arrival of Paul D., one of the ''Sweet Home men'' from Sethe's past. The Sweet Home men were the male slaves of the establishment. Their owner, Mr. Garner, is no Simon Legree; instead he's a best-case slave-holder, treating his ''property'' well, trusting them, allowing them choice in the running of his small plantation, and calling them ''men'' in defiance of the neighbors, who want all male blacks to be called ''boys.'' But Mr. Garner dies, and weak, sickly Mrs. Garner brings in her handiest male relative, who is known as ''the schoolteacher.'' This Goebbels-like paragon combines viciousness with intellectual pretensions; he's a sort of master-race proponent who measures the heads of the slaves and tabulates the results to demonstrate that they are more like animals than people. Accompanying him are his two sadistic and repulsive nephews. From there it's all downhill at Sweet Home, as the slaves try to escape, go crazy or are murdered. Sethe, in a trek that makes the ice-floe scene in ''Uncle Tom's Cabin'' look like a stroll around the block, gets out, just barely; her husband, Halle, doesn't. Paul D. does, but has some very unpleasant adventures along the way, including a literally nauseating sojourn in a 19th-century Georgia chain gang. THROUGH the different voices and memories of the book, including that of Sethe's mother, a survivor of the infamous slave-ship crossing, we experience American slavery as it was lived by those who were its objects of exchange, both at its best - which wasn't very good - and at its worst, which was as bad as can be imagined. Above all, it is seen as one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised. The slaves are motherless, fatherless, deprived of their mates, their children, their kin. It is a world in which people suddenly vanish and are never seen again, not through accident or covert operation or terrorism, but as a matter of everyday legal policy. Slavery is also presented to us as a paradigm of how most people behave when they are given absolute power over other people. The first effect, of course, is that they start believing in their own superiority and justifying their actions by it. The second effect is that they make a cult of the inferiority of those they subjugate. It's no coincidence that the first of the deadly sins, from which all the others were supposed to stem, is Pride, a sin of which Sethe is, incidentally, also accused. In a novel that abounds in black bodies - headless, hanging from trees, frying to a crisp, locked in woodsheds for purposes of rape, or floating downstream drowned - it isn't surprising that the ''whitepeople,'' especially the men, don't come off too well. Horrified black children see whites as men ''without skin.'' Sethe thinks of them as having ''mossy teeth'' and is ready, if necessary, to bite off their faces, and worse, to avoid further mossy-toothed outrages. There are a few whites who behave with something approaching decency. There's Amy, the young runaway indentured servant who helps Sethe in childbirth during her flight to freedom, and incidentally reminds the reader that the 19th century, with its child labor, wage slavery and widespread and accepted domestic violence, wasn't tough only for blacks, but for all but the most privileged whites as well. There are also the abolitionists who help Baby Suggs find a house and a job after she is freed. But even the decency of these ''good'' whitepeople has a grudging side to it, and even they have trouble seeing the people they are helping as full-fledged people, though to show them as totally free of their xenophobia and sense of superiority might well have been anachronistic. Toni Morrison is careful not to make all the whites awful and all the blacks wonderful. Sethe's black neighbors, for instance, have their own envy and scapegoating tendencies to answer for, and Paul D., though much kinder than, for instance, the woman-bashers of Alice Walker's novel ''The Color Purple,'' has his own limitations and flaws. But then, considering what he's been through, it's a wonder he isn't a mass murderer. If anything, he's a little too huggable, under the circumstances. Back in the present tense, in chapter one, Paul D. and Sethe make an attempt to establish a ''real'' family, whereupon the baby ghost, feeling excluded, goes berserk, but is driven out by Paul D.'s stronger will. So it appears. But then, along comes a strange, beautiful, real flesh-and-blood young woman, about 20 years old, who can't seem to remember where she comes from, who talks like a young child, who has an odd, raspy voice and no lines on her hands, who takes an intense, devouring interest in Sethe, and who says her name is Beloved. Students of the supernatural will admire the way this twist is handled. Ms. Morrison blends a knowledge of folklore - for instance, in many traditions, the dead cannot return from the grave unless called, and it's the passions of the living that keep them alive - with a highly original treatment. The reader is kept guessing; there's a lot more to Beloved than any one character can see, and she manages to be many things to several people. She is a catalyst for revelations as well as self-revelations; through her we come to know not only how, but why, the original child Beloved was killed. And through her also Sethe achieves, finally, her own form of self-exorcism, her own self-accepting peace. ''Beloved'' is written in an antiminimalist prose that is by turns rich, graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous, colloquial and very much to the point. Here, for instance, is Sethe remembering Sweet Home: ''. . . suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not want to make her scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her - remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.'' In this book, the other world exists and magic works, and the prose is up to it. If you can believe page one - and Ms. Morrison's verbal authority compels belief - you're hooked on the rest of the book. THE epigraph to ''Beloved'' is from the Bible, Romans 9:25: ''I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.'' Taken by itself, this might seem to favor doubt about, for instance, the extent to which Beloved was really loved, or the extent to which Sethe herself was rejected by her own community. But there is more to it than that. The passage is from a chapter in which the Apostle Paul ponders, Job-like, the ways of God toward humanity, in particular the evils and inequities visible everywhere on the earth. Paul goes on to talk about the fact that the Gentiles, hitherto despised and outcast, have now been redefined as acceptable. The passage proclaims, not rejection, but reconciliation and hope. It continues: ''And it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people; there shall they be called the children of the living God.'' Toni Morrison is too smart, and too much of a writer, not to have intended this context. Here, if anywhere, is her own comment on the goings-on in her novel, her final response to the measuring and dividing and excluding ''schoolteachers'' of this world. An epigraph to a book is like a key signature in music, and ''Beloved'' is written in major. 'OTHER PEOPLE WENT CRAZY, WHY COULDN'T SHE?' Sethe opened the front door and sat down on the porch steps. The day had gone blue without its sun, but she could still make out the black silhouettes of trees in the meadow beyond. She shook her head from side to side, resigned to her rebellious brain. Why was there nothing it refused? No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept? Like a greedy child it snatched up everything. Just once, could it say, No thank you? I just ate and can't hold another bite? I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up. I am still full of that, God damn it, I can't go back and add more. Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft - hiding close by - the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them - looking and letting it happen. But my greedy brain says, Oh thanks, I'd love more - so I add more. And no sooner than I do, there is no stopping. There is also my husband squatting by the churn smearing the butter as well as its clabber all over his face because the milk they took is on his mind. . . . And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now. And if Paul D saw him and could not save or comfort him because the iron bit was in his mouth, then there is still more that Paul D could tell me and my brain would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you. I don't want to know or have to remember that. I have other things to do: worry, for example, about tomorrow, about Denver, about Beloved, about age and sickness not to speak of love. But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day. . . . Other people went crazy, why couldn't she? Other people's brains stopped, turned around and went on to something new, which is what must have happened to Halle. And how sweet that would have been. From ''Beloved.''

'Turtles All the Way Down' Review: Isabela Merced Is Spectacular in Heartfelt YA Drama

Spoiler alert: it's not about turtles.

The Big Picture

• Isabela Merced delivers a powerful performance as Aza in Turtles All the Way Down , showcasing her range and depth.
• Director Hannah Marks infuses the movie with vibrant energy and humor, making the highs and lows even more powerful.
• Creative cinematography and sound design effectively visualize Aza's OCD, but the movie doesn't always convey the relentless nature of her illness.

Since his first novel released in 2005, author John Green has demonstrated a passion for making teenagers feel seen and valued for all of their complexities. Never underestimating their intelligence, Green has been penning philosophical, wildly eloquent youths for nearly twenty years, and Turtles All the Way Down is but his latest successful YA novel — and latest batch of loveable teens — to be adapted for the silver screen. Helmed beautifully by director Hannah Marks and rewritten for the screen by Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker , Turtles All the Way Down explores one teen's ( Isabela Merced ) experience navigating high school with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). As she tries to forge her own path while wrestling with her fears of the world around her, Aza learns that while her illness will always be a part of her, the love that her friends and family have for her is just as enduring.

Given that the film is based on a 300-page novel, the movie houses a complex narrative that might be a bit confusing for viewers not familiar with the book. Similarly, the movie doesn't always nail the mercilessness of Aza's OCD. Nonetheless, Turtles All the Way Down is a love letter to adolescence , even in its hardest moments. Whether it’s singing in the car with your best friend or experiencing the salacious thrill of receiving your first PG-13 text message, Marks and the young cast find the moments of joy among the hardships, and craft a charming, original coming-of-age story that can sit proudly in the pantheon of beloved YA fiction .

What Is 'Turtles All the Way Down' About?

Telling the story of 17-year-old Aza Holmes, Turtles All the Way Down offers a glimpse into her struggles with OCD, and her attempts to regain control over her mind and her future while dealing with new romance and lingering grief. Accompanied by her buoyant best friend, Daisy ( Cree ), and her revered hand-me-down car, Aza finds herself attempting to solve the case of a missing billionaire while falling for his son , Davis Pickett ( Felix Mallard ), with whom she reconnects after having been friends as kids.

Part mystery, part romance, part Applebee's commercial (if you know, you know), Turtles All the Way Down is a reminder that we are so much more than our least favorite parts of ourselves and that the right people will love us for exactly who we are.

Director Hannah Marks Finds the Joy in 'Turtles All the Way Down'

While Turtles All the Way Down deals with serious issues like grief and the toll of mental illness, Marks imbues the movie with such color and humor that the highs and lows feel even more powerful. Whether it’s through the many shots of nature or the rich hues of the characters’ outfits, every shot is artfully assembled and gives the film a bright, youthful energy. Beyond just the color palette, Marks also shows a talent for comedy , creating laugh-out-loud moments with effective jump-cuts. Her attention to detail is also admirable, with little touches such as the turtle dangling from Daisy's bracelet showing the depth of her care for the film.

From 'Once' To 'Unwind': 10 Young Adult Books That Deserve A Movie Adaptation

The young cast of Turtles All the Way Down also contributes to the movie's funny tone. Cree's Daisy Ramirez is a bright, witty character who could easily fall into the archetype of the quirky one-dimensional best friend , but Cree brings an infectious energy and, at times, a patient calmness that creates a well-rounded, fitting counterpart for Aza. As Aza’s love interest, Felix Mallard brings the kind of earnest, poetic teenage boy angst that many of our young selves failed to find anywhere other than the pages of, well, a John Green novel, and Maliq Johnson offers another friend to Aza in Mychal, with an optimistic sweetness that Johnson shows off in spades. While Turtles All the Way Down is certainly more about the kids than the adults, Scrubs ' Judy Reyes and Never Have I Ever 's Poorna Jagannathan are also excellent, providing gentle anchors for Aza as her mother and therapist, respectively.

Isabela Merced Gives a Career-Defining Performance in 'Turtles All the Way Down'

The entire cast of Turtles All the Way Down brings something distinct and wonderful to the movie. However, with her performance as Aza, Merced draws you in with a remarkable range , able to warm your heart one moment and crush it the next. She plays the teenager's stressful moments with incredible depth as Aza resorts to dangerous methods in her attempts to quiet the noise in her head, but also captures the character's youth in times of levity, hitting all the right notes in her nuanced performance.

The chemistry between Merced and Cree as Aza and Daisy is perhaps the film's greatest strength — and certainly its greatest love story. Their effortless comedy and obvious care for one another make the friendship feel totally believable , and it makes their fights all the more devastating.

'Turtles All the Way Down' Is More Effective as a Book Than a Movie

One advantage that a book has over a movie in the case of a story like Turtles All the Way Down, is that the written word allows for the kind of constant internal dialogue that a character like Aza experiences daily. She's constantly thinking about the last time she changed the band-aid on her finger, the sweat pooling on her upper lip, other people’s breath washing over her face — her ruminations are relentless. In the movie, the moments where Aza’s anxiety is spotlighted are powerful. A harsh buzz cuts in like a record scratch, drowning out all other noise while jarring flashes of various bacteria and microbes fill the screen in what Aza refers to as "thought spirals." We’re shown the overwhelming terror that her OCD causes, which will ring particularly true for any viewer who consistently finds themselves lost in thought spirals of their own. Unique cinematography offers more visual support to the panic, creating a landscape that seems to center Aza in a whirlpool of personal torment. In one brief but incredibly effective moment, the world around Aza appears like a blacklight, and we’re given deeper insight as to just how terrifying her world is, with threats looming on every surface ready to infect her.

However, the portrayal of Aza’s anxiety throughout Turtles All the Way Down is something of a double-edged sword. There are long stretches of the film where we’re given none of the visual or auditory clues that Aza’s stuck in a thought spiral at all, so for an audience member, there are moments in the movie where you might forget about her illness altogether . On one hand, this is great, as it serves as a reminder that Aza is so much more than her OCD and that there is a life to be lived beyond the taunting of her mind. However, it’s also significant that Aza is constantly tethered to her illness, and while in the movie she’s often pulled back into her spirals after long stretches of relative peace, Turtles All the Way Down sometimes fails to convey the relentless nature of Aza’s OCD. At the beginning of the film, something as seemingly mundane as sipping from a soda can will trigger a frightening buzz, but these effects are seldom used as the film goes on.

Isabela Merced Says Her Chemistry With Bella Ramsey in 'The Last of Us' Season 2 Was There on Day One [Exclusive]

Similarly, the complex plot of the novel doesn't always translate to the screen . While fans of the book will be able to easily piece together the narrative and fill in the blanks, some major events of the film might lack a greater emotional impact for new viewers without the context that the book provides. However, new things are added to Turtles All the Way Down that aren't in the original work, allowing the filmmakers to add their own stamp to Aza's story, and the screenwriters do a solid job of taking John Green's at-times unbelievably verbose characters and making them feel supremely real.

Regardless of its slight fallbacks, Turtles All the Way Down tells a moving story about a teenager's isolating struggle with mental illness , and her resolve to build a life for herself despite it. Isabela Merced's performance as Aza will likely go down in the books as one of the most impressive of her career, and Hannah Marks' vibrant direction makes for a fun and endearing watch that ultimately honors the tragedies and triumphs of its young protagonist.

Turtles All The Way Down

Turtles All the Way Down lacks the impact of the novel it's based on, but strong performances and lively direction make it a charming and emotional coming-of-age story.

• Isabela Merced gives a powerful, moving performance as Aza
• Hannah Marks' direction offers a youthful energy and great comedy
• Creative cinematography helps visualize Aza's OCD
• The complex plot doesn't always translate to the screen, so the story can feel disjointed
• The film goes long stretches uninterrupted by Aza's thoughts, failing to show the unrelenting nature of her OCD

Turtles All the Way Down is available to stream on Max in the U.S. starting May 2.

WATCH ON MAX

The best new books out now, as selected by avid readers and critics

Welcome to ABC Arts' monthly book column: a shortlist of new release reads recommended by The Book Show's Claire Nichols, The Bookshelf's Cassie McCullagh, ABC Arts' Nicola Heath and critics Declan Fry and Jinghua Qian.

All read voraciously and widely, and the only guidelines we give them are: make it a new release; make it something you think is great.

The resulting list includes the latest novel from three-time Booker-nominated Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan and a previously unpublished novella by Charmian Clift, unarguably one of Australia's most acclaimed writers of the 20th century.

Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan

There's no mistaking the ambition of this thumping 641-page novel.

Borrowing the form of a sprawling Victorian novel, O'Hagan's attempt at capturing contemporary Britain is grand and often glorious.

We're swept through the streets of London and into its nooks and crannies — from art galleries and private clubs to council flats and sweatshops. And we're also taken into the lives of dozens and dozens of characters and cameos (59 are listed at the front). We meet aristocrats and oligarchs as well as drill rap gangs and would-be immigrants trapped in sweatshops that would have been called workhouses in a previous century.

At the heart is Campbell Flynn, a barely disguised cipher for O'Hagan himself. He's a working class outsider who's climbed the greasy pole and become a public intellectual — a writer and broadcaster of impeccable taste and education. Who better to see Britain inside-out and top-to-bottom?

Ambition is what drives each of these people. For some it's money, status, fame, sex, beauty, even more money. For others, it's a job, somewhere to live, enough to eat. Some are drawn with a mere few sentences. With the major characters, the arc of hubris spans the entire narrative.

It's as if O'Hagan has taken a core sample of the geology of Britain's class and social structure and revealed its strata, from the deeply buried to the most recent.

Some readers will flag at the two-thirds mark; others will find O'Hagan's flair exhilarating and his surgical evisceration of Britain compelling.

— Cassie McCullagh

Martyr by Kaveh Akbar

There are books you devour feverishly, and others you nibble line by line, allowing yourself only a portion each day so you can sit with it and savour it to the last.

Martyr! was like that for me, a book I set down at the end of each chapter despite my greed for the pages to come. I wanted to draw it out, to live between doses, to see the afternoon sun on the river while carrying these characters in my mind.

Cyrus Shams is a poet who barely writes, though he is thinking (and drinking) about a book on secular martyrs – people who have died for their beliefs. Meanwhile, he scrapes by selling his plasma and pretending to die so med students can rehearse their empathy when delivering terminal diagnoses.

In some ways he’s a typical disaffected twenty-something, obsessed with death and paralysed by potential. He’s also an orphan compelled to fossick for meaning in the deaths of his parents: his mother, the accidental martyr, was one of 290 aboard the Iranian passenger flight shot down by the US military in 1988; while his father’s ordinary death is all the more tragic for being unnewsworthy.

Martyr! is an ambitious, monumental work dealing with the meaning of death and life. It’s also a book that revels in absurdity and contemporary pop culture references. In-jokes abound – for writers, addicts, artists and the Iranian diaspora.

One chapter sees the protagonist’s dead mother facing off against a familiar spiky yellow heroine, Lisa Simpson. Other scenes capture the tedious self-flagellation of millennial queer culture, or the way love feels like excoriating, lonely madness.

The startling sensual accuracy of Akbar’s metaphors remind you that this is a novel by a poet, but the plot and shifting perspectives are so well engineered that you forget this is a debut.

Martyr! is a book that radiates with existential glory and secular mysticism, but it’s also a story that lives in the current, material world. Our world. Our unbearable, violent, senseless world.

— Jinghua Qian

The White Cockatoo Flowers by Ouyang Yu

Transit Lounge

Provocateur, DIY punk and your friendly neighbourhood poet-uncle, Ouyang Yu is a transgressor whose faith lies only in the hardest vices (poetry, disappointment).

Although he has translated several works of Australian literature (The Female Eunuch, Fly Away Peter, The Ancestor Game, to name a few) and many Chinese poets, The White Cockatoo Flowers is his first collection of short fiction in English. It reveals Yu to be an incisive romantic and satirist.

Filtering, through several literatures and cultures, the lives of the lonely and rootless, his exiles and outcasts are both in love with and eternally dissatisfied by China — a place they return to but never feel entirely at home in — and Australia, source of drab, lonely desolation.

They keep wanting to say 拜拜, 澳洲! — Goodbye, Australia! — but can never quite leave. (Picture here Philip Roth's character Mickey Sabbath: "How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here.")

They may seem similar to the author known as Ouyang Yu (or 欧阳昱), but don't be fooled: this isn't autofiction, it's fiction that automatically refuses categorisation. Fiction that doesn't "give a shit about nation, nationality and nonsense".

Yu's narrative voice is puckish and insouciant. It's never entirely clear what is serious, what is droll, what is a joke. Suffice to say that nothing ever feels wholly earnest or cynical, at least where the self is concerned.

Physicality — the body and its excretions, weather, food — punctuate everything, alongside ugly feelings and everyday disappointments (unanswered phone calls, emails, texts; sometimes answered ones, too). Stories frequently end with a sense of still being in progress and left behind early.

The collection's humour tends to derive from small observations and insights that become funnier when you appreciate the peculiarities of both English and Chinese.

Many tales chronicle lost generations of men isolated by both Australian suburbia and the ruptures of post-89 China, uninclined to look back and energised only by loneliness, language, boredom, horniness and humour. They refuse the West's goal of "profitsuccessdeath" in favour of poetry and food, masturbation and fantasy.

As Yu writes: "Tomorrow is another day. There is no climax. No anticlimax. Just this stream of unconsciousness."

Yu has experienced, like several other 90s Ozlit punks (Dorothy Porter, Christos Tsiolkas, Kathleen Mary Fallon, Ania Walwicz, Susan Hampton , others), a renaissance of late . Rightly so. He embodies, as one character puts it, the poetic spirit: all he does is live his poetry and let his poetry live through him.

The cool kids are on board (invitations to bar readings! hip literary hangouts!). The uncool kids are on board, too. It's a big bus. Let's get driving. 拜拜！

— Declan Fry

The End of the Morning by Charmian Clift (edited by Nadia Wheatley)

More than 50 years after her, Australian writer Charmian Clift’s literary star continues to rise, in no small part thanks to the dedication of her editor and biographer, Nadia Wheatley. 

In 2022, Wheatley edited a new collection of Clift essays, Sneaky Little Revolutions. Now, she is behind the release of a previously unpublished fragment of an autobiographical novel Clift worked on throughout the 60s.

The End of the Morning is told from the perspective of Cressida Morley — Clift’s alter ego, who also appears in her husband George Johnston’s acclaimed trilogy (which included the Miles Franklin-winning novels My Brother Jack and Clean Straw for Nothing). 

Cressida, aged 10 or 11, is the youngest of the three Morley children, who live with their parents, Tom and Grace, in the fictional Lebanon Bay, a stand-in for Clift’s hometown of Kiama, NSW. 

While Cordelia, the eldest, is a beauty and her parents’ favourite, Cressida, middle child Ben and their fellow quarry kids run wild in the scrubby dunes around Lebanon Bay. 

“We were frowzled, freckled children, skinny and hard, with our front teeth still coming down like half-lowered blinds… We could swim like fish and fight like tigers.”

Clift captures the insularity of their life on the NSW south coast in the Depression-era years of the 1930s. Despite the family’s straitened circumstances, it’s an idyllic and richly cultured childhood. 

Grace Morley declaims poetry while doing the laundry in the backyard, while Tom Morley — who works in the quarry’s machine shop over the hill — insists the children read Rabelais and Cervantes rather than The Wind in the Willows. 

Readers who reach the end of the 50-page novella will inevitably want more, which Wheatley delivers in the form of an afterword providing valuable context about Clift and her life. 

Clift and Johnston, who had three children together, were close literary collaborators and co-wrote several novels. Over the years, Clift routinely put aside her solo projects to assist the prolific Johnston in writing his books and, later, after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, became his carer. 

In 1968, Clift won a six-month Commonwealth Literary Fund (CLF) fellowship to write The End of the Morning — notably half the value of the 12-month fellowship awarded to Johnston in 1967. She died by suicide in 1969.

The last half of this book comprises 30 of the roughly 225 essays Clift wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne’s Herald, a weekly column upon which much of her popularity and literary reputation rest. 

Tackling issues such as the role of women, property development and consumerism, Clift’s voice sounds remarkably modern. She provides a fascinating snapshot of Australia in the 60s, and reveals how closely her novella draws from her life.

— Nicola Heath

Bullet Paper Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars by Abbas El-Zein

Upswell Publishing

"It is psychotic to draw a line from one place to another," wrote poet and author Bhanu Kapil about the partition of India. "It is psychotic to submit to violence in a time of great violence and yet it is psychotic to leave that home or country, the place where you submitted again and again, forever."

Abbas El-Zein — a professor at the University of Sydney and author of three books, including an award-winning memoir — applies these ideas to the Middle East in his book Bullet Paper Rock. But he makes those lines of enclosure into trajectories of flight.

Tracing the lives of family, the repercussions of political corruption, sociopolitical trauma and war from the 1970s through to the present, this memoir is a testament to the examined life.

El-Zein's writing is by turns witty and heartfelt, his meditations guided by wisdom and love. We witness the invasion of Lebanon by the Syrian government of Hafiz al-Assad, during which El-Zein finds an "accidental, if nicely ironic" resonance in a cinema screening Alain Resnais's La guerre est finie (The War is Over) at the demarcation line between a civil war-scarred East and West Beirut.

We see the incursions of soldiers from Israel into Lebanon, variously targeting the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the refugees of 1948 as they stage guerilla attacks to liberate the land they have been exiled from.

He explores the afterlives of language in postcolonial Beirut, where multilingualism is both part of Lebanon's European and Arabic lineage, and particular to the Lebanese Arabic language.

As an author, El-Zein describes himself as "unconverted, unenchanted", and prey to the urge "to bid farewell, at long last, to the unloved century that has made my world". Which begs the question: is to give up to relinquish faith?

This book is about the pain of distance, both temporal and geographical, and how it overwhelms "our collective ability to make sense of events and challeng[es] our capacity to remember and, even more gravely, our need to forget".

But it is a pain that encourages, for El-Zein, considerations of faith and hope: "The Bible insists that 'hope maketh not shamed', but why should hope be associated with shame in the first place, so as to require rebuttal?" he asks.

"Is it because despair is safer, more hard-headed, its bleakness more likely to be borne out by the world? Is there shame, then, in being wrong about the future? Or is hope a kind of false promise?"

Amid the "small joys of kith and kin", El-Zein envisages community as interdependence, the will to imagine.

In the end, for earthly salvation, that is all we have.

The Spoiled Heart by Sunjeev Sahota

Harvill Secker

A book about a UK union election probably shouldn't be this interesting.

Sunjeev Sahota's fourth novel takes us to the author's own hometown of Chesterfield, where lifelong union man Nayan is running to be the first man of colour to lead Britain's biggest union. He's been told he has it in the bag, and he's feeling confident — but in this novel, pride will come before a fall of epic proportions.

As union officials, Nayan and his rival — a younger woman called Megha (a woman who shares his Indian heritage) — are both firmly on the left. But within that world, their personal political ideologies set them firmly apart.

Megha's focus on identity, particularly racial identity, means her campaign is about confronting racism and discrimination. The older Nayan, however, isn't interested in identity politics. He sees the union's struggle as a class issue (Sahota himself has said UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is "not my racial friend, he is my class enemy"). For Nayan, solidarity is key.

The political divide escalates — and becomes personal — very quickly.

Meanwhile, Nayan is pursuing a relationship with an old classmate, Helen, and developing a bond with her troubled teenage son Brandon. Nayan lost his own mother and son in a tragedy 20 years earlier (with his marriage collapsing soon after) and perhaps sees in Helen and Brandon a ready-made family for him to slot himself in to. But, in this novel, nothing is as easy as it seems.

I read much of The Spoiled Heart with my heart in my mouth. The tension of the election, the pitfalls that Nayan strides into, and the utter tragedy of his past are revealed with great skill by Sahota, who is twice Booker-nominated for previous novels The Year of the Runaways and China Room.

For me, it's one of the best reads of 2024 so far.

— Claire Nichols

Naag Mountain by Manisha Anjali

Giramondo Publishing

Manisha Anjali takes the violence of indentured labour that her Indo-Fijian ancestors experienced and weaves a dream of sustenance and communion in her new book Naag Mountain.

The writer's second collection sings and improvises history through dreams, visions and hallucinations, bringing together peoples displaced and indentured by the Colonial Sugar Refining Company. The thousand-mouthed snake called the Naag weaves routes of narrative poetry across the Pacific, traversing India, Fiji, Aotearoa and the continent christened Australia.

Anjali doesn't seek to fantasise or imagine wholeness, but instead looks to honour brokenness. As she writes, "Loss is the birthplace of song." Loss here is acceptance of life, the connections between generations and the regeneration of song and dream.

What I especially like in this collection are the connections Anjali draws between ideas of affect and aftermath, the reliance of our dreams and psychic intuitions upon that woolly mammoth we often (falsely) dub the "real world". The universe of dream and affect is no less real or material than the world it draws upon and survives through.

She puts this beautifully, linking the materiality of food and the body with ritual, solace, ephemeralities that can be made real, tangible: "The poetry of rice is in the rituals performed before ingestion. Ingestion is a form of gratitude, and a commitment to living as flesh."

Anjali's poetry maps trepanation, the skull turned inside out, the act of retrieving memory "the same as summoning a ghost", forging connections between irreconcilable journeys.

The Naag is coiled and circular, capable of dissolving the separation between the colony and the New World, between the more than 62,000 South Sea Islanders from across the Pacific Ocean who were taken to Australia for sugar and cotton labour between 1863 and 1904 — in many cases abducted, forced, trafficked — and the indentured labourers of India.

Forced migration, indentured labour: the violence of the colony is always surreal, informed by its own dreams and cryptic imagery — cryptic because translation and exegesis might bury the bones again.

Naag Mountain is a place where the material and immaterial are both incarnate; where incantation is commemoration, summoning the dead back to life and making visions and dreams manifest: "Start by pulling at the throat […] Draw out the venom with your tongue. Spit it out. Spit it out."

Tune in to ABC RN at 10am Mondays for  The Book Show  and 10am Saturdays for  The Bookshelf .

• X (formerly Twitter)

Related Stories

A new book from a feminist icon and a pacey crime thriller are among our fave reads this month.

'A masterclass in psychology': How poker helped Nam Le become an award-winning author

'Visceral', 'provocative' and 'assured': The six books vying for the $60,000 Stella Prize

• Arts, Culture and Entertainment
• Books (Literature)