Beloved

Beloved is a 1987 novel by Toni Morrison that tells the story of a Black woman named Sethe, who has escaped slavery in Kentucky and now lives in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1873. The novel is set after the American Civil War and explores the destructive legacy of slavery through flashbacks to her time as a slave. Sethe's home is haunted by a malevolent spirit, the ghost of her dead daughter, Beloved, who returns to haunt her. 

Morrison was inspired to write the novel by the true story of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery in Kentucky in 1856 and was later captured by US marshals under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. When Garner tried to kill her children to prevent them from being returned to slavery, Morrison drew inspiration from an account of the event titled "A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child" in an 1856 newspaper article. 

Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award.