What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorLies We Tell Ourselves
Robin Talley · 376 pages
In 1959 Virginia, Sarah, a black student who is one of the first to attend a newly integrated school, forces Linda, a white integration opponent's daughter, to confront harsh truths when they work together on a school project.
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
Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case
Patricia Hruby Powell · 260 pages
Written in blank verse, the story of Mildred Loving, an African American girl, and Richard Loving, a Caucasian boy, who challenge the Viriginia law forbidding interracial marriages in the 1950s.
Of Love and Dust
Ernest J. Gaines · 281 pages
When young Marcus is bonded out of jail, where he has been awaiting his trial for murder, he is sent to the Hebert plantation to work in the fields. He treats the Cajun overseer, Sidney Bonbon, with supreme contempt, even as Bonbon works him nearly to death. Marcus takes his revenge by first seducing Bonbon's black mistress, Pauline, and then his wife, Louise. Jim Kelly, the tractor driver, watche
An Extraordinary Union
Alyssa Cole · 258 pages
"As the Civil War rages between the states, a courageous pair of spies plunge fearlessly into a maelstrom of ignorance, deceit, and danger, combining their unique skills to alter the course of history and break the chains of the past... Elle Burns is a former slave with a passion for justice and an eidetic memory. Trading in her life of freedom in Massachusetts, she returns to the indignity of sla
Calling Me Home
Julie Kibler · 336 pages
A debut novel interweaving the story of a heartbreaking, forbidden love in 1930s Kentucky with an unlikely modern-day friendship. Eighty-nine-year-old Isabelle McAllister has a favor to ask her hairdresser Dorrie Curtis: drop everything and drive from Arlington, Texas, to a funeral in Cincinnati. Tomorrow. Dorrie, fleeing problems of her own, agrees. It's a journey that changes both their lives,
The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd · 311 pages
Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike with its strong, assured voice. Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racis
The Dry Grass of August
Anna Jean Mayhew · 320 pages
Being Plumville
Savannah J. Frierson · 262 pages
Living in the small, southern town of Plumville is effortless, seamless, and safe, if you follow the rules. You're given them from birth, and anything that could possibly make you break them is removed from your life-even if it's your best friend. Such is the case for Benjamin Drummond and Coralee Simmons, two best friends separated during childhood because Benjamin is white, Coralee is black, and
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
Fire from the Rock
Sharon M. Draper · 240 pages
The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove
Susan Gregg Gilmore · 303 pages
Born to prominent but dysfunctional Nashville parents, Bezellia Grove leans on disregarded African-American servants as substitute family figures and incites wrath from both groups when she pursues an interracial relationship.
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.
Whistling Past the Graveyard
Susan Crandall · 320 pages
Determined to get to Nashville to find her mother in 1963, nine-year-old spitfire Starla Claudelle runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home, eventually accepting a ride from a Eula, a black woman traveling alone with a white baby. In 1963, determined to get to Nashville to find her mother, nine-year-old spitfire Starla runs away from her strict grandmother's Mississippi home. The
Page From A Tennessee Journal
Francine Thomas Howard · 288 pages
Genna Colon desperately wants to escape from a drug-infested world of poverty, and every day she wishes for a different life. One day Genna's wish is granted and she is instantly transported back to Civil War-era Brooklyn.
The Help
Kathryn Stockett · 464 pages
Be prepared to meet three unforgettable women: Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will
Summer of my German Soldier
Bette Greene · 230 pages
When her small hometown in Arkansas becomes the site of a camp housing German prisoners during World War II, 12-year-old Patty Bergen learns what it means to open her heart. Although she's Jewish, she begins to see a prison escapee, Anton, not as a Nazi--but as a lonely, frightened young man with feelings not unlike her own, who understands and appreciates her in a way her parents never will. And
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Fannie Flagg · 403 pages
Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Ala
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart
Joyce Carol Oates · 405 pages
Joyce Carol Oates adds to her extraordinary body of work with this stunning novel of violence and love. At the heart of the story are two people, Iris Courtney, who is white, and handsome Jinx Fairchild, the black basketball player who, in protecting Iris, kills a white man. Iris is the only witness to the crime. The two of them are growing up in the early 1950s in a New York industrial town w
Southern Ruby
Belinda Alexandra · 521 pages
Forbidden love. Family secrets. A twist of fate. The stunning new generational saga from Belinda Alexandra, bestselling author of Tuscan Rose and White Gardenia. In New Orleans - the city of genteel old houses and ancient oak trees covered in Spanish moss, of seductive night life, of Creole culture, voodoo and jazz - two women separated by time and tragedy will find each other at last. Amanda, orp
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston · 231 pages
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is a classic Harlem Renaissance novel by American writer Zora Neale Hurston. The novel follows Janie Crawford as she recounts the story of her life as she journeys from a naive teenager to a woman in control of her destiny.
Penumbra
Carolyn Haines · 280 pages
The daughter of a white mother and black father, beautician and undertaker's assistant Jade Dupree comes to the aid of her white half-sister, Marlena, when the woman is found badly beaten and her young daughter kidnapped.