What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorHarper 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
Intruder in the Dust
William Faulkner · 247 pages
Using his preferred stream-of-consciousness style the author tells a story of a black farmer in Mississippi accused of murdering a white man.
Beloved
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
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
Paris Trout
Pete Dexter · 320 pages
An expertly crafted and bleakly fascinating tale of social conflict and madness in the deep South, this novel centers on the eponymous Paris Trout, owner of a general store and other property in Cotton Point, Ga., during the years just after World War II. A cunning, violent man, with deep roots in the community, Trout has become an economic predator of the town's poor blacks by running a loan serv
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
Billy
Albert French · 219 pages
Albert French lights up the monstrous face of American racism in this harrowing tale of ten-year-old Billy Lee Turner, who is convicted of and executed for murdering a white girl in Banes County, Mississippi in 1937. Billy is about the deaths of two children, one girl, one boy, the girl's death an accident, the boy's a murder perpetrated by the state. Though the events Billy records occur during
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.
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
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler · 287 pages
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduou
Blue Hole Back Home
Joy Jordan-Lake · 303 pages
The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963
Christopher Paul Curtis · 239 pages
The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.
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
Black Like Me
John Howard Griffin · 190 pages
Publisher's description: Studs Terkel tells us in his Foreword to the definitive Griffin Estate Edition of Black Like Me: "This is a contemporary book, you bet." Indeed, Black Like Me remains required reading in thousands of high schools and colleges for this very reason. Regardless of how much progress has been made in eliminating outright racism from American life, Black Like Me endures as a gre
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers · 334 pages
Set in 1930s Georgia, the novel centers around a deaf and mute man, John Singer. Singer has been devastated by the loss of his dear friend, Antonapoulos, who was committed to an asylum for bad behavior
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
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.
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
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.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass · 126 pages
This book is an autobiographical account by runaway slave Frederick Douglass that chronicles his experiences with his owners and overseers and discusses how slavery affected both slaves and slaveholders.