Beloved: Pulitzer Prize Winner

Toni Morrison

Jul 2007 · Sold by Vintage

About this eBook

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

Ratings and reviews

Toni Morrison is a superb storyteller. This story will take you on a journey that will help to understand some of the pain associated with being a slave as well as the times immediately after the Civil War. This story is powerful and riveting.

A brilliant novel that "speaks" the language of its characters and smacks the reader in the face with issues of oppression, race/ethnicity, gender roles, the afterlife, and moralistic dilemmas. One would be hard-pressed not to think on this work long after reading it.

This was my introduction to Morrison and it struck me by how intense, powerful and steadfast her writing could be. This book carries no euphemisms. It calls the monster by its name: slavery. I loved how each character dealt with their suffering in their own way. How they did not let it define them. I loved watching them grow. They read to me like real people, beating vigorously through the pages. An instant favorite.

About the author

TONI MORRISON is the author of eleven novels, from The Bluest Eye (1970) to God Help the Child (2015). She received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She died in 2019.