Beloved

Recommended by Trisha Pasricha, gastroenterologist and instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School; author of the upcoming “You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong.”

The great Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” is often interpreted as a ghost story. But the unsettling aspect of this story lies not in the supernatural, but in the unanswered questions about love and trauma in our real world, where readers can grapple with them long after the novel is over. Morrison’s most enigmatic novel, “Beloved” is at its heart a love story — the love of a mother and a daughter plunging in and out of the darkest of hours. Morrison begins by flipping convention: the most striking event of the story, which in any other novel would have been the climax, is revealed from the very start. By making that event the story’s backdrop rather than its pinnacle, Morrison can explore an at-times dreamy, often devastating future world that asks, “What if …?”