Beloved by Toni Morrison

This 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning novel is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who attempted to kill her four children, succeeding in murdering one. In this book, the protagonist, Sethe, also kills one of her four children in order to save the baby from slavery. The baby comes back as a ghost to haunt the house that Sethe and her daughter, Denver, live in, and after a while they tolerate the damage the ghost does. When the ghost comes back reincarnated as a nineteen-year-old woman, she will do anything to get Sethe's love.
I wouldn't recommend this book to just anyone. It has a lot of mature subjects, and also is a challenge to read. But if you're a good reader; don't mind a bunch of murder, sex and violence; and like Faulkner and the slave narrative tradition, this is the book for you! I particularly enjoyed how Morrison leaves gaps in the story for the reader to figure out. Sometimes you understand what you read 100 pages later, and sometimes you have to guess what she means.