When I decided to include Toni Morrison’s Beloved in my forests-of-fiction series, I knew who to reach out to. My former professor and friend, Philip Weinstein, is not only an expert on modern and contemporary fiction and author of – among numerous excellent books – What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison, he’s also just so smart and insightful.

I’m not going to write too much as a preamble to the episode itself, but I will say, if you haven’t read Beloved, do!

I don’t want to put you off listening to the episode, but there’s no doubt that you’ll get more out of it if you’ve read the book (of course, you can always listen twice, once before and once after). And, more to the point, it’s one of those books… that knits itself into your DNA.

Through the tragic story of Sethe, inspired by a newspaper clipping Morrison found about Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed her daughter, rather than to let her be captured and forced into slavery, Morrison attempts to write a kind of of psychological and emotional history of slavery. And it is uncompromising and also gripping. Simply put, Morrison is such a first-class storyteller that once you’re firmly in her hands, you’ll give yourself over to her. And I would like to think that one emerges from the book just that much more compassionate.