What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorWide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys · 189 pages
Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler · 287 pages
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduou
Gone with the Wind, Part 2 of 2
John Escott, Margaret Mitchell · 1,024 pages
Wash
Margaret Wrinkle · 408 pages
When the pressures of early 1800s westward expansion and debt threaten to destroy everything he's built, a troubled Revolutionary War veteran embarks on an audacious plan involving setting one of his male slaves as his breeding sire.
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead · 416 pages
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a youn
The Invention of Wings
Sue Monk Kidd · 384 pages
Hetty "Handful" Grimké, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimké household. The Grimké's daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women. On Sarah's eleventh birthday, she is given ownership of ten ye
Mudbound
Hillary Jordan · 335 pages
"It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm; a place she finds foreign and frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything her husband is not; charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat. Ronsel Jackson, eld
Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi · 320 pages
Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the
The Kitchen House
Kathleen Grissom · 368 pages
"In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds
The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron · 413 pages
This is a controversial historical novel purporting to tell the story of Nat Turner, a black American slave who led a large slave revolt in Virginia in 1831. The novel attempts to explore the reasons for the bloodthirsty revolt in which Turner and his followers killed a number of white plantation owners before being apprehended, tried and hanged.
Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner · 378 pages
The story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."
On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon
Kaye Gibbons · 273 pages
Like America in the mid-nineteenth century, Emma Garnet Tate Lowell is at war with herself. Born to privilege on a James River plantation, she grows up more and more aware that her family's prosperity is inextricably linked to the institution of slavery. Bookish and sensitive, young Emma Garnet sets herself against her bumptious, self-made father, Samuel P. Tate, at an early age. In the company of
Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell · 864 pages
Margaret Mitchell's monumental epic of the South won a Pulitzer Prize, gave rise to the most popular motion picture of our time, and inspired a sequel that became the fastest selling novel of the century. It is one of the most popular books ever written: more than 28 million copies of the book have been sold in more than 37 countries. Today, more than 60 years after its initial publication, its ac
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 288 pages
Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in
The Wind Done Gone
Alice Randall · 217 pages
In this daring and provocative literary parody which has captured the interest and imagination of a nation, Alice Randall explodes the world created in GONE WITH THE WIND, a work that more than any other has defined our image of the antebellum South. Taking sharp aim at the romanticized, whitewashed mythology perpetrated by this southern classic, Randall has ingeniously conceived a multilayered, e
The Known World
Edward P. Jones · 400 pages
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for *Paradise Lost* and an unusual mentor -- William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation -- as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to
Scarlett
Alexandra Ripley · 832 pages
The Bondwoman's Narrative
Hannah Crafts · 351 pages
Possibly the first novel written by a black woman slave, this work is both a historically important literary event and a gripping autobiographical story in its own right.
Roots: The Saga of an American Family
Alex Haley · 704 pages
Roots is a novel written by Alex Haley and published in 1976. It portrays the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his alleged descendants in the U.S. down to Haley. The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, Roots (1977), led to a cultural se
Cane River
Lalita Tademy · 418 pages
The "New York Times" bestseller and Oprah's Book Club Pick--the unique and deeply moving epic of four generations of African-American women based on one family's ancestral past.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain · 330 pages
The Book of Night Women
Marlon James · 432 pages
From a young writer who radiates charisma and talent comes a sweeping, stylish historical novel of Jamaican slavery that can be compared only to Toni Morrison's Beloved.The Book of Night Women is a sweeping, startling novel—a true tour de force of both voice and storytelling—that tells the story of a young slave woman on a sugar plantation in Jamaica at the turn of the nineteenth century, revealin
The House Girl
Tara Conklin · 372 pages
A novel of love, family, and justice follows Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in a Manhattan law firm, as she searches for the "perfect plaintiff" to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.