Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)

A house on the edge of Cincinnati shakes with the rage of a dead infant. "124 was spiteful," the novel begins, and the venom belongs to a baby whose mother once cut her throat rather than let a slavecatcher carry her back into bondage. When the ghost returns in the flesh, a glutted, devouring young woman who calls herself Beloved, Sethe gives herself over to the daughter she killed, starving to feed a love that has no bottom. Toni Morrison wrote the unspeakable arithmetic of slavery from the inside: what it costs a mother to decide her child is better dead than owned, and what a life built on that choice does to the one who made it. The prose moves like grief itself, circling the thing it cannot say until it must. Few novels have looked so steadily at the worst love is capable of, or insisted so fiercely that the people who survived deserve to be remembered by name.