What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
David Mitchell · 479 pages
The year is 1799, the place Dejima in Nagasaki Harbor, the “high-walled, fan-shaped artificial island” that is the Japanese Empire’s single port and sole window onto the world, designed to keep the West at bay; the farthest outpost of the war-ravaged Dutch East Indies Company; and a de facto prison for the dozen foreigners permitted to live and work there. To this place of devious merchants, decei
Sea of Poppies
Amitav Ghosh · 521 pages
At the heart of this epic saga, set just before the Opium Wars, is an old slave ship The Ibis. Its destiny is a tumultuous voyage across the Indian Ocean; its crew a motley array of sailors, stowaways, and convicts. In a time of colonial upheaval, the ship boasts a diverse cast of Indians, coolies, and Westerners, from a bankrupt raja to a widowed village woman, from a mulatto American to an evang
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad · 464 pages
A gripping tale of capitalist exploitation and rebellion, set amid the mist-shrouded mountains of a fictional South American republic, employs flashbacks and glimpses of the future to depict the lure of silver and its effects on men. Conrad's deep moral consciousness and masterful narrative technique are at their best in this, one of his greatest works.
A Falcon Flies
Wilbur Smith · 523 pages
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
Ship of Magic
Robin Hobb · 698 pages
Bingtown is a hub of exotic trade and home to a merchant nobility famed for its liveships—rare vessels carved from wizardwood, which ripens magically into sentient awareness. Now the fortunes of one of Bingtown’s oldest families rest on the newly awakened liveship Vivacia. For Althea Vestrit, the ship is her rightful legacy. For Althea’s young nephew, wrenched from his religious studies and f
We, the Drowned
Carsten Jensen · 678 pages
Follows a century in the port town of Marstal on an island off the coast of Denmark, whose citizens' lives are indelibly shaped by forces ranging from wars and shipwrecks to taboo survival practices and forbidden passions.
Middle Passage
Charles R. Johnson · 209 pages
Someone Knows My Name
Lawrence Hill · 499 pages
Dreaming of escaping her life of slavery in South Carolina and returning to her African home, slave Aminata Diallo is thrown into the chaos of the Revolutionary War, during which she helps create a list of black people who have been honored for their service to the king.
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
Lew Wallace · 551 pages
A bestseller since 1880...The classic saga of the Roman EmpireFrom a thrilling sea battle to its famous chariot race to the agony of the Crucifixion, this is the epic tale of a prince who became a slave and by a twist of fate and his own skill-won a chance at freedom.
Cloudsplitter
Russell Banks · 763 pages
From book jacket: Narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist and martyr, John Brown. Deeply researched, brilliantly plotted, and peopled with a cast of unforgettable characters both historical and wholly invented, **Cloudsplitter** vividly re-creates the antislavery movement of the 1840s and traces it through the br
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 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 March
E.L. Doctorow · 375 pages
In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white re
Voyager
Diana Gabaldon · 1,059 pages
From the author of the breathtaking bestsellers Outlander and Dragonfly in Amber, the extraordinary saga continues.Their passionate encounter happened long ago by whatever measurement Claire Randall took. Two decades before, she had traveled back in time and into the arms of a gallant eighteenth-century Scot named Jamie Fraser. Then she returned to her own century to bear his child, believing hi
Star of the Sea
Joseph O'Connor · 432 pages
Scales of Gold
Dorothy Dunnett · 519 pages
Martin Chuzzlewit
Charles Dickens · 792 pages
The greed of his family has led wealthy old Martin Chuzzlewit to become suspicious and misanthropic, leaving his grandson and namesake to make his own way in the world. And so young Martin sets out from the Wiltshire home of his supposed champion, the scheming architect Pecksniff, to seek his fortune in America. In depicting Martin's journey – an experience that teaches him to question his inherit
Hunting Midnight
Richard Zimler · 512 pages
A young boy forms a friendship with an African mystical healer called Midnight, until a betrayal changes the course of John Zarco Stewart's life, sending him from Africa to the plantations of America's Deep South.
The Slave Dancer
Paula Fox
For use in teaching literature to high school students. Kidnapped by the crew of an Africa-bound ship, a thirteen-year-old boy discovers to his horror that he is on a slave ship and that his job is to play music for the exercise periods of the human cargo.
Byzantium
Stephen R. Lawhead · 688 pages
Although born to rule, Aidan lives as a scribe in a remote Irish Monastery on the far, wild edge of Christendom. Secure in work, contemplation, and dreams of the wider world, a miracle bursts into Aidan's quiet life. He is chosen to accompany a small band of monks on a quest to the farthest eastern reaches of the known world, to the fabled city of Byzantium, where they are to present a beautiful a
Washington Black
Esi Edugyan · 432 pages