Beloved

Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. It is set after the American Civil War and follows Sethe, a mother of four, whose Cincinnati home is troubled by a hostile spirit and who is living with her past. The novel's narrative has loose links to Margaret Garner, a woman who fled slavery in Kentucky in 1856.

The opening is Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873, where Sethe lives at 124 Bluestone Road with Denver, her eighteen-year-old daughter. The house has had a haunting for years, which the two of them attribute to the ghost of Sethe's youngest child, and Denver is shy, keeps to herself and never leaves the house. Sethe's two sons left home at about thirteen, which she puts down to the ghost.

Sethe escaped slavery at a cost that included a husband and a child, and the young woman who arrives and calls herself Beloved pulls the family's buried history back into the open. Morrison wrote the novel to give a physical presence to a history that was absent from literature, and it gives an inner life to people who had been enslaved as well as describing their circumstances.

It is a standalone novel and one of the central works of American fiction of its period, and it was adapted into a film in 1998.