Beloved

Sethe is a formerly enslaved woman living in Cincinnati in 1873, haunted by the ghost of the baby daughter she killed to prevent her from being taken back into slavery. Morrison does not explain or justify or contextualize. She inhabits. The novel exists inside the logic of what slavery actually did to people's minds, bodies, and relationships — the physical memory stored in the back, the way the past refuses to stay in the past, the love that becomes the most violent thing in the world. The most important American novel of the 20th century.