Hello everyone,

The next Book in Challenge 2020 is a Nobel prize winner – Toni Morrison with Beloved.

It is the mid-1800s. An era is ending. Slavery is coming under the attack from the abolitionists.

Meet Sethe, born into slavery and haunted by her past. She has escaped to Ohio but 18 years have passed and still Sethe is haunted by her past. Held forever captive by her memories of Sweet Home, Kentucky – a farm that holds a lot of bad memories for her.

“Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her…It was not a story to pass on…they forgot her like a bad dream…Beloved.”

Sethe’s world becomes one of violence and death when her baby daughter, nameless, died at her hands and whose tombstone reads one word ‘Beloved’.

“…Dearly Beloved. But what she got, settled for, was the one word that mattered. She thought it would be enough…Enough to answer one more preacher, one more abolitionist…”

Sethe does everything she can to move forward from the past and leave it behind her but with the memories gnawing away at her every fibre, her past may come back to haunt her.

“Would it be all right? Would it be all right to to go ahead and feel? Go ahead and count on something?”

When a young teenage girl arrives mysteriously calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s whole world is about to be brought into focus. Her terrible secrets are about to explode wide into the open and there’s nothing she can do…

“Beloved. You are my sister. You are my daughter. You are my face; you are me. I have found you again; you have come back to me. You are my Beloved. You are mine. You are mine. You are mine.”

This is a heart wrenching and emotional book. Horror and beauty, life and death, violence and love are all entwined and brought together in ways that will entrance you.

This book is incredibly apt considering what’s going on in the world at the moment. At a time where the black lives matters message is at the forefront of our minds, this book reminds us of the past but it is important to remember it and not forget it. This is the only way that we can inform our future.

“Beloved, she my daughter. She mine.”

Find it on Amazon now!

Until next time,

Keep reading,

D x