Beloved — Toni Morrison (1987)

Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize-winning novel — based on the true story of escaped slave Margaret Garner who killed her infant daughter rather than see her returned to slavery — is the most important American novel of the 20th century's second half. Its exploration of slavery's psychological devastation, its extraordinary prose, and its use of magical realism to externalise trauma make it a work of world literature by any standard.