The 1987 Toni Morrison novel about a mother who kills her child is Beloved.
Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, kills her young daughter rather than allow her to be captured and returned to slavery. Years later, the child’s ghost appears at the Cincinnati home where Sethe lives with her daughter Denver and her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs. The supernatural element gives physical form to the psychological wounds of slavery.
Morrison based the central incident on the real story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped in 1856 and killed her daughter when capture seemed imminent. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and is widely regarded as one of Morrison’s major works.
The novel has been challenged or removed from some schools because of its depictions of infanticide, sexual violence, racism, profanity, and slavery’s brutality. The other choices are also Morrison novels, but none centers on this particular act of maternal violence.