''An American masterpiece'' AS Byatt Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home - the farm where she was kept as a slave for many years. Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, Sethe is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, ''Beloved''.
A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison''s enduring masterpiece and best-known work.
''Toni Morrison was a giant of her times and ours..."Beloved," is a heartbreaking testimony to the ongoing ravages of slavery, and should be read by all'' Margaret Atwood, New York Times **One of the BBC''s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
''Jazz blazes with an intensity more usually found in tragic poetry of the past.... Morrison''s voice transcends colour and creed and she has become one of America''s outstanding post-war writers'' Guardian
Joe Trace - in his fifties, door-to-door salesman of Cleopatra beauty products, erstwhile devoted husband - shoots dead his lover of three months, the impetuous, eighteen-year-old Dorcas.
At the funeral, his determined, hard-working wife, Violet, who is given to stumbling into dark mental cracks, tries with a knife to disfigure the corpse. Passionate and profound, Jazz brings us back and forth in time, in a narrative assembled from the hopes, fears and realities of black urban life.
''She wrote about what was difficult and what was necessary and in doing so she unearthed for a generation of people a kind of redemption, a kind of relief'' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, New York Times
BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR OF BELOVED
Winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow award for achievement in American fiction
