Set during the years following the American Civil War. Sethe, a former slave, is haunted by the adult ghost of her dead baby who she murdered to prevent her also becoming a slave.
Toni Morrison is the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and her novels concentrate on the experience of black people in American history. Beloved was inspired by the story of a real slave, Margaret Garner, who in 1851 escaped with her children from her master in Kentucky. When she was about to be re-captured, she tried to kill her children rather than return them to a life of slavery. The novel won the Pullitzer Prize in 1988.
