Toni Morrison writes a Nobel Prize winning visceral novel about  what it was really like to survive slavery in the deep South and live after the Civil War. Read this novel if you want to know the truth.

Excerpt:

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees, drawn up; holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight like a skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.