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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.
Vintage
June 2004
Featuring: Sethe; Denver; Baby Suggs
352 pages ISBN: 1400033411 Trade Size (reprint)
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Fiction | Historical
Toni Morrison's magnificent Pulitzer Prize-winning
novel--first published in 1987--brought the unimaginable
experience of slavery into the literature of our time and
into our comprehension. Set in post-Civil War Ohio, it is
the story of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked her life
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. Sethe, who now lives in a small house on
the edge of town with her daughter, Denver, her
mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, and a disturbing, mesmerizing
apparition who calls herself Beloved. Sethe works at "beating back the past," but it makes itself
heard and felt incessantly: in her memory; in Denver's fear
of the world outside the house; in the sadness that consumes
Baby Suggs; in the arrival of Paul D, a fellow former slave;
and, most powerfully, in Beloved, whose childhood belongs to
the hideous logic of slavery and who 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 possession of her present--and to throw
off the long-dark legacy of her past--is at the center of
this spellbinding novel. But it also moves beyond its
particulars, combining imagination and the vision of legend
with the unassailable truths of history.
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