Beloved, by Toni Morrison (Vintage, £6.99 in UK)

Trailers for the forthcoming feature film starring Oprah Winfrey suggest that Hollywood's Beloved will be a considerably glossier and decidedly less hard-hitting affair than Toni Morrison's. A nervy, disturbing ghost story rooted in the slave culture of Kentucky, Morrison's is a tale of despair, destruction and the most dysfunctional family imaginable. Beloved is an easy novel to admire - Morrison's technical flair and incisive observations are consistently astonishing - but its uncompromising blend of horror and devotion made it, for this reader, a difficult book to actually like.