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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorBeloved
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
Your Blues Ain't Like Mine
Bebe Moore Campbell · 376 pages
A fictionalization of the 1955 Emmett Till murder, in which a teenage boy from Chicago was lynched in Mississippi after speaking French in the presence of a young white girl. "Intriguing ... A thoughtful, intelligent work ... The novel traces the yeasr from he '50s to the ate '80s, from Eisenhower to George Bush ... She writes with simple eloquence about small-town life in the South, right after t
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Ernest J. Gaines · 246 pages
"This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960's. In this woman Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure, a woman equipped to stand beside William Faulkner's Dilsey in The Sound And The Fury." Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has 'endured,' has seen almo
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
Jubilee
Margaret Walker · 432 pages
The fortunes of a mulatto girl--as a slave during the Civil War and then as a woman freed by the Emancipation Proclamation.
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.
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 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.
The Dry Grass of August
Anna Jean Mayhew · 320 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
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)
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe · 451 pages
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
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
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
Lies 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.
Four Spirits
Sena Jeter Naslund · 560 pages
In the wake of racial tensions in 1960s Alabama, sheltered white college student Stella participates in her first freedom movement and finds her life changed in several ways when she develops friendships with local African Americans.
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.
The Land
Mildred D. Taylor · 375 pages
The son of a prosperous landowner and a former slave, Paul-Edward Logan is unlike any other boy he knows. His white father has acknowledged him and raised him openly-something unusual in post-Civil War Georgia. But as he grows into a man he learns that life for someone like him is not easy. Black people distrust him because he looks white. White people discriminate against him when they learn of h
A Thousand Never Evers
Shana Burg · 310 pages
IN KUCKACHOO, MISSISSIPPI, 1963, Addie Ann Pickett worships her brother Elias and follows in his footsteps by attending the black junior high school. But when her careless act leads to her brother's disappearance and possible murder, Addie Ann, Mama, and Uncle Bump struggle with not knowing if he's dead or alive. Then a good deed meant to unite Kuckachoo sets off a chain of explosive events. Addie
Gathering of Waters
Bernice L. McFadden · 252 pages
The story is narrated by the town of Money, Mississippi. Tass Hilson and Emmett Till were young and in love when Emmett was murdered in 1955. Anxious to escape the town, Tass marries Maximillian May and relocates to Detroit. Forty years later, after the death of her husband, Tass returns to Money and fanstasy takes flesh when Emmett Till's spirit is finally released from the waters of the Tallahat
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.
Harper Lee Collection: To Kill a Mockingbird + Go Set a Watchman
Harper Lee · 624 pages