Random House is partnering with World Book Night to offer free books to an army of passionate readers to give away to members of the public across the UK and Ireland to share their love of reading. Whilst I have read and loved many of the books on the list of 25 choices, Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer-winning Beloved has to be my favourite novel of all time.
Beloved is dedicated to ‘Sixty million and more’ and when I first read the novel at sixteen, I had been taught about the slave trade but this novel opened it up to me in a way that the history books never had and reading it was an incredibly emotional and eye-opening experience.
The novel is based on the true story of a slave called Margaret Garner who killed her own daughter rather than allow her to go back into slavery. In the UK today, we can have little understanding of what this must have been like and Beloved opens your eyes to how a mother could be driven to such an unthinkable act and the effect of this oppression on race relations today. Beloved is a powerful social novel but it is also one of the most beautifully written and moving books I have ever read. It centres on the life of former slave Sethe and her struggle for freedom from her past and the shocking and devastating decision she comes to in order to 'save' her children from such a life, which will haunt her forever.
The novel opens with Sethe and her daughter Denver who live in a house haunted by the ghost of Sethe’s first baby girl until Paul D (who was a fellow slave with Sethe) helps them exorcise the ghost. However, this peace is very brief as a mysterious stranger called ‘Beloved’ arrives and her appearance changes their lives forever.
Reading the novel is rather like peeling back the layers of an onion as the narrative is told in both past and present and as the present unfolds with the dark foreboding presence of Beloved, the reader learns more about Sethe’s horrific past and how her baby daughter died. Any preconceptions that the reader may have before reading the novel will be challenged by Toni Morrison’s lyrical portrayal of Sethe’s actions and her past, which are brought to life in a way that text books never can achieve. It is an incredibly emotional, rich and powerful novel that will stay with you long after reading. I have subsequently reread the novel many times would not hesitate to recommend this to friends and family and I hope you might take the time to do the same if you love this book as much as I do: http://www.worldbooknight.org/