What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Mapmaker's Children
Sarah McCoy · 435 pages
"When Sarah Brown, daughter of abolitionist John Brown, realizes that her artistic talents may be able to help save the lives of slaves fleeing north, she becomes one of the Underground Railroad's leading mapmakers, taking her cues from the slave code quilts and hiding her maps within her paintings. She boldly embraces this calling after being told the shocking news that she can't bear children, b
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.
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 Seven Daughters of Dupree
Nikesha Elise Williams · 336 pages
A Day to Pick Your Own Cotton
Michael R. Phillips · 310 pages
It's impossible to describe to anyone who's never been a slave what it's like to suddenly realize you're free. I would never forget what I felt like that day as long as I lived. Two very different girls, one the daughter of a slave, the other the daughter of a plantation owner, must fight to stay alive -- and together -- after being orphaned by the Civil War. Katie and Mayme are forced to grow up
The Resurrectionist
Matthew Guinn · 288 pages
A young doctor wrestles with the legacy of a slave "resurrectionist" owned by his South Carolina medical school.
A Light in the Wilderness
Jane Kirkpatrick
The Chaneysville Incident
David Bradley · 442 pages
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Taylor Jenkins Reid · 400 pages
Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now? Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her professional life is going nowhere. Regardless of w
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
Underground to Canada
Barbara Smucker · 150 pages
Two slave girls escape from a plantation near Vicksburg, Mississippi, and steal toward Canada on the Underground Railroad.
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
Yellow Crocus
Laila Ibrahim · 243 pages
"Moments after Lisbeth is born, she's taken from her mother and handed over to an enslaved wet nurse, Mattie, a young mother separated from her own infant son in order to care for her tiny charge. Thus begins an intense relationship that will shape both of their lives for decades to come. Though Lisbeth leads a life of privilege, she finds nothing but loneliness in the company of her overwhelmed m
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.
All Different Kinds of Free
Jessica McCann · 268 pages
"A free woman of color in the 1830s, Margaret Morgan lived a life full of promise. One frigid night in Pennsylvania, that changed forever. [She] was kidnapped from her home and sold into slavery. The state of Pennsylvania charged her kidnapper with the crime, but the conviction was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. It was the first time a major branch of the federal government had made a
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
Veil of Pearls
MaryLu Tyndall · 314 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.
Island Beneath the Sea
Isabel Allende · 457 pages
Though her childhood of slavery on Saint-Domingue is one of brutality and fear, Tt? finds solace in the traditional rhythms of African drums and in the voodoo loas she discovers through her fellow slaves. When twenty-year-old Toulouse Valmorain arrives on the island in 1770 to run his father's plantation, he purchases young Tt? as his bride and becomes dependent on the services of his teenaged sla
I Thought My Soul Would Rise and Fly: The Diary of Patsy, a Freed Girl, Mars Bluff, South Carolina 1865 (Dear America Series)
Joyce Hansen · 202 pages
The two-time Coretta Scott King Honor Book recipient offers a poignant narrative about a freed slave girl during the Reconstruction Era in the South.