Beloved

Toni Morrison—author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby—is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination.

It is the story—set in post-Civil War Ohio—of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in order to wrench herself from a living death; who has lost a husband and buried a c…