Hay Festival has today revealed its September Book of the Month selection – Toni Morrison’s Beloved – continuing its campaign to celebrate and ignite conversation around current and backlist books that have contemporary resonance.
First published in 1987, Beloved is Toni Morrison’s enduring masterpiece, told with heart-stopping clarity, melding horror and beauty. Set in the mid-1800s as slavery looks to be coming to an end, it follows the story of Sethe, a former slave haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her life. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love.
Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. She is the author of many novels, including The Bluest Eye, Beloved (made into a major film), Paradise and Love. She has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fiction. She appeared at Hay Festival to talk about the iconic text and her career in 2014.
Peter Florence, director of Hay Festival, said: “Hay Festival’s Book of the Month is a digital extension of what we do at our festivals here and around the world, bringing writers and readers together to engage in the latest ideas in the arts and sciences. Profoundly shocking and exquisitely written, Beloved is a novel that demands re-reading, generation after generation.”
Chosen by the festival team in Hay on Wye, based on public recommendations, the monthly Book of the Month promotion revisits and re-celebrates great works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry that reach through time to touch the present.
Titles are sold in the UK through the festival’s online shop, as well as being available in all good libraries and bookshops, with a digital festival of promotion supporting online, including curated streams on the festival’s new Hay Player archive.
Find out more about Hay Festival’s Book of the Month at hayfestival.org/book-of-the-month or explore #HayBookOfTheMonth on Twitter.