Beloved
1987 · Toni Morrison · 324 pages · Literary Fiction
Toni Morrison's 1987 novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, and the decades since have only confirmed its standing as one of the most important American novels ever written. It is a difficult, demanding, sometimes bewildering book that asks readers to sit with the reality of slavery in ways that most fiction about the subject does not attempt. Morrison's prose is extraordinary, her structure is bold, and her emotional range is devastating. Not every reader will finish it, and some who do will need time to understand what happened to them. That's by design.