Learn about the other books on the list.Beloved by Toni Morrison
A novel about slavery is never likely to warm the heart but this tale of a woman who kills her own child rather than have her become a slave – a crime for which she is forever haunted – is chilling. Of all the crimes committed by the slave owners, none is so awful as the iron bit that traps the tongue of Paul D. He recalls “The wildness that shot up into the eye the moment the lips were yanked back.” A depressing book but perhaps necessarily so.
Beloved also appears on Elif Shafak's top five list of fictional mothers, Charlie Jane Anders's list of ten great books you didn't know were science fiction or fantasy, Peter Dimock's top ten list of books that challenge what we think we know as "history", Stuart Evers's top ten list of homes in literature, David W. Blight's list of five outstanding novels on the Civil War era, John Mullan's list of ten of the best births in literature, Kit Whitfield's top ten list of genre-defying novels, and at the top of one list of contenders for the title of the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years.
--Marshal Zeringue
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