by Toni Morrison · 1973
In the Bottom, a Black hill community above Medallion, Ohio, two girls, Nel and Sula, grow up inseparable before Sula leaves town for a decade of college and drifting; when she returns, her defiance of the community's moral codes, including sleeping with Nel's husband, turns her into the town's living embodiment of evil even as the novel traces the Peace and Wright family households across the decades.