Beloved

by Toni Morrison, 275 pages

Almost 20 years after the end of the Civil War and Emancipation, former slaves are struggling to survive.  Sethe and her daughter, Denver, are isolated from the black community and left alone to deal with brutal memories and ghosts of the past.  Paul D., another former slave from Sethe's past returns, and his arrival is soon followed by that of a stranger who seems at once alien and familiar.  These newcomers revive a past that Sethe has fought to keep buried for twenty years.  "Beloved" won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This book is incredibly powerful and very hard to read.  Morrison brings slavery and a post-war Ohio painfully to life.  About twenty pages in, I wasn't sure I was going to make it, but the story sucked me in.  Just when I was sure I couldn't take any more, Morrison would throw in a moment of love or kindness that was all the more meaningful for the awful reality in which the characters live.  A great read, but you'll need a strong constitution to make it through!