What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorHomegoing
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
Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation
Octavia E. Butler · 240 pages
The book is the first-person account of a young African-American woman writer, Dana, who finds herself being shunted in time between her Los Angeles, California home in 1976 and a pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. (This is the comic adaptation of the original novel written by Olivia E. Bulter)
The Secret of Magic
Deborah Johnson · 444 pages
Working for a prominent member of the NAACP in 1946 when a request comes from her favorite childhood author to investigate the murder of a black war hero, Regina Robichard travels to Mississippi, where she navigates the muddy waters of racism, relationships, and her own tragic past.
Sophie's Choice
William Styron · 625 pages
The gripping, unforgettable story of Stingo, a 22-year-old writer; Sophie, a Polish-Catholic beauty who survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz; and Nathan, her mercurial lover. The three friends share magical, heart-warming times until doom overtakes them as Sophie's and Nathan's darkest secrets are revealed.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou · 281 pages
She was born Marguerite, but her brother Bailey nicknamed her Maya ("mine"). As little children they were sent to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. Their early world revolved around this remarkable woman and the Store she ran for the black community. White people were more than strangers - they were from another planet. And yet, even unseen they ruled. The Store was a microcosm
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 274 pages
The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula
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.
Harper Lee Collection: To Kill a Mockingbird + Go Set a Watchman
Harper Lee · 624 pages
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
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
Mean Spirit
Linda Hogan · 380 pages
The Grayclouds discover oil on their Oklahoma ranch in the 1920's and that sets off a continuous round of crime and suffering.
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
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
Stella by Starlight
Sharon M. Draper · 304 pages
When a burning cross set by the Klan causes panic and fear in 1932 Bumblebee, North Carolina, fifth-grader Stella must face prejudice and find the strength to demand change in her segregated town.
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.
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison · 338 pages
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s ori
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 Dry Grass of August
Anna Jean Mayhew · 320 pages
Sweetsmoke
David Fuller · 309 pages
The year is 1862, and the Civil War rages through the South. On a Virginia tobacco plantation, another kind of battle soon begins. There, Cassius Howard, a skilled carpenter and slave, risks everything—punishment, sale to a cotton plantation, even his life—to learn the truth concerning the murder of Emoline, a freed black woman, a woman who secretly taught him to read and once saved his life. It i
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
Summertime
Vanessa Lafaye · 354 pages
Florida, 1935, and the residents of Heron Key are preparing for the 4th of July barbecue, little realising how much their world is about to change. Tensions simmer at the party and in the early hours of the morning, a woman is found half-beaten to death. As whites turn on blacks, the finger of suspicion points at one man. Far over the Atlantic a tropical storm changes direction and turns towards F