As extraordinary as the character who inspires its title, Beloved is seminal both in its stylistic achievements and its searing depiction of the lives of African Americans under slavery. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988, and in 2006 was ranked the nation’s best work of fiction of the past 25 years by the New York Times. At its daring, startling heart lies the image of infanticide; an act of paradoxical violence by which an escaped slave, Sethe, saves her child from a life like her own. Unnamed, the baby is buried in a grave marked ‘Beloved’, but her time among the living has not drawn to an end.