Sethe escaped slavery but cannot escape its ghost: her daughter, killed by her own hand rather than returned to bondage, has come back. Morrison based this on a true story she found in a newspaper clipping, and the novel took her years to write, the weight of it almost unbearable. The prose moves between lyrical beauty and devastating violence without warning. Time fractures; memory bleeds into present; the house at 124 Bluestone Road is haunted not by horror-movie spirits but by American history itself. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for it, and later the Nobel. This is the novel that asks what freedom costs when you have already paid everything.