by Toni Morrison · 1987
Set in Ohio in the years after the Civil War, the novel follows Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman haunted by a past she cannot outrun and, eventually, by a mysterious young woman who arrives at her door and seems to embody it. As the true nature of this visitor becomes clear, Sethe, her daughter Denver, and her lover Paul D are forced to confront the unspeakable choice Sethe once made to keep her children out of slavery's reach. Morrison renders memory, motherhood, and trauma with a fractured, incantatory structure that moves between the horrors of Sweet Home plantation and the fragile freedom that follows.