Book Club (FTP Edition): Beloved, Toni Morrison (1987)

The "FTP list" (that's F the Patriarchy if you missed it) was born after I realized Modern Library's Top 100 has very few women's voices and zero black women's voices. This is my attempt at righting that wrong.

With selection 2 on this fine list (taking your recommendations by the way), we turn to one of the most haunting, celebrated, and necessary novels in American literature, Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Beloved is a spellbinding story about the scars of slavery, the fierce bonds of motherhood, and the way the past refuses to stay buried. Set in post–Civil War Ohio, it follows Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman trying to build a life for herself and her family. Her home is haunted, literally, by the ghost of her dead daughter, and figuratively, by the traumas she’s endured.

We’ll meet unforgettable characters: Sethe, determined and wounded; Denver, her curious and sheltered daughter; Paul D, who carries his own ghosts; and the mysterious young woman who calls herself “Beloved.”

As Morrison weaves together memory, myth, and magical realism, the novel asks us to face the truths that America still struggles to acknowledge.

If you’ve never read Beloved, this is the time. If you’ve read it before, you know it only deepens on rereading.

There is an audiobook version read by the author that I plan to check out.

Finally, enjoy this cool website of book covers of Beloved as published around the world.

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