New Folio Society Edition of Toni Morrison’s <i>Beloved</i>
The Folio Society is proud to announce its publication of one of the most important American novels of the past few decades. Toni Morrison’s 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 , and in a New York Times survey was ranked the nation’s best work of fiction of the past years. 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.
Underlying this tale’s many hauntings—literal and metaphorical—are the stark realities of slavery, every bit as brutal as the experience of stoical Sethe and her kin. Morrison’s many-layered narrative gradually tells their story, revealing the bonds that tie them to each other, in life and in death, and how they strive to cope with memories of appalling abuses, losses and indignities. Mingling past and present, magic and realism, Morrison evokes beautifully both the joys and tragedies experienced by her compellingly sympathetic heroine.
Morrison specifically requested that author Russell Banks introduce this edition. He writes earnestly of how Beloved has the power to transform the reader because it ‘lets one know how it feels to be an American and, yes, black and female, and ultimately how, at the deepest and most inclusive level, it feels to be human’.
Joe Morse’s award-winning illustrations, approved by the author, capture the novel’s extraordinary power.
Product information
Bound in cloth, blocked with a design by Joe Morse. Set in New Caledonia. 304 pages. 9 full-page colour illustrations. 9” ? 6¼”.
UK £39.95 US $69.95 Can/Aus $79.95
Publication date 13 May 2015
