I just finished "Beloved" by Toni Morrison. It was fantastic, as is all Morrison. She uses ghosts and folklore to help in telling very real stories about the horrors of slavery. There's no wonder the woman has won the Nobel Prize for literature, she's absolutely brilliant and I highly recommend any of her books.
Now I'm onto Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes. I read half of it in one day, it's very interesting. It's a fictional novel about a young mentally handicapped man named Charlie who becomes the first human subject of an experimental neurological operation aimed at making him "smart". The story is told through Charlie's journals, and is underlined by frequent spelling and grammar mistakes in the early entries, along with obvious miscomprehension of the world around him.. as the book progresses and Charlie's intelligence grows, the journal entries very slowly become more and more intelligent with him, until you realise he's become a genius. Algernon, meanwhile, is the mouse the experiment was first tested on, and when he begins to deteriorate Charlie realises that the same will happen to him, and has to slowly watch his newfound brilliance slip away.
It's VERY sad and VERY good so far.