"Beloved" is a haunting and powerful novel that explores the devastating legacy of slavery on the human psyche. Written by Toni Morrison, the book tells the story of Sethe, a former slave who has escaped to freedom but is haunted by the memory of her past. Sethe is haunted both by the horrors of slavery and by the ghost of her own child, who she was forced to kill to prevent her from being captured and returned to slavery. When a mysterious young woman named Beloved appears in her life, Sethe is forced to confront the painful truths of her past and the impact they have had on her present. ...

Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl, prays every day for beauty. Mocked by other children for the dark skin, curly hair, and brown eyes that set her apart, she yearns for normalcy, for the blond hair and blue eyes that she believes will allow her to finally fit in.Yet as her dream grows more fervent, her life slowly starts to disintegrate in the face of adversity and strife. A powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity, Toni Morrison’s virtuosic first novel asks powerful questions about race, class, and gender with the subtlety and grace that have always characterized...

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world....