A house on the outskirts of Cincinnati is haunted by the ghost of a baby, and the living know exactly who she is. Toni Morrison published this novel in 1987, drawing on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter rather than allow her return to bondage. The narrative does not unfold in sequence; it erupts, each character's memory surfacing in fragments the reader must piece together like evidence at a trial where the crime is history itself. Morrison's prose carries the weight of spirituals and the precision of testimony. Beloved is not merely a ghost story but an act of resurrection, calling by name the sixty million and more to whom the novel is dedicated, those whose stories were never told.