Beloved (Everyman's Library) - Hardcover

Toni Morrison

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307264882 ISBN 13: 9780307264886

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 2006

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past.

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.

Review:

As with the ghost at its center, Beloved has taken many forms--from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to Oprah Winfrey's decade-in-the-making movie to this challenging audiobook read by Lynn Whitfield. Whitfield, who won an Emmy Award playing the title role in The Josephine Baker Story, has a tough assignment as she guides us back and forth in time with Sethe, an escaped slave who's still shackled by memories of her murdered child. But, as we shift between Sethe's brutal plantation days and her haunted life immediately after the Civil War, we learn one secret after another until, finally, past and present are masterfully reconciled. (Running time: three hours, two cassettes) --Kimberly Heinrichs

From the Inside Flap:

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.

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0307264882
• ISBN 13: 9780307264886
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 316