What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe 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.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe · 451 pages
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
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
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
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
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
Wash
Margaret Wrinkle · 408 pages
When the pressures of early 1800s westward expansion and debt threaten to destroy everything he's built, a troubled Revolutionary War veteran embarks on an audacious plan involving setting one of his male slaves as his breeding sire.
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 Good Lord Bird
James McBride · 468 pages
Fleeing his violent master at the side of abolitionist John Brown at the height of the slavery debate in mid-nineteenth-century Kansas Territory, Henry pretends to be a girl to hide his identity throughout the raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.
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.
Nightjohn
Gary Paulsen · 92 pages
Summary: Twelve-year-old Sarny's brutal life as a slave becomes even more dangerous when a newly arrived slave offers to teach her how to read.
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson/Those Extraordinary Twins
Mark Twain · 321 pages
Presents the complete text of "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and "Those Extraordinary Twins" along with textual notes and a collection of critical reviews and essays on the works.
A Picture of Freedom: The Diary of Clotee, a Slave Girl, Belmont Plantation, Virginia 1859
Patricia C. McKissack · 192 pages
In 1859 twelve-year-old Clotee, a house slave who must conceal the fact that she can read and write, records in her diary her experiences and her struggle to decide whether to escape to freedom.
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.
The Wedding Gift
Marlen Suyapa Bodden · 336 pages
When wealthy plantation owner Cornelius Allen marries off his daughter Clarissa, he presents her with a wedding gift: a young slave woman called Sarah. It just so happens that Sarah is Allen's daughter as well, the product of a long-term sexual relationship with his slave Emmeline. When Clarissa's husband rejects her newborn son as illegitimate and sends Clarissa and Sarah back to the Allens, thei
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
The Chamber
John Grisham · 644 pages
John Grisham's bestselling backlist newly repackaged with fantastic new coversAdam Hill is 26 years old and in his first year at a top Chicago law firm. He voluntees for the toughest assignment any lawyer could ask for. His prospective client does'nt want Adam or his law firm. He is an unrepentent and outspoken racist with a violent past. He is on Death Row for the murder of two Jewish children in
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.
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.
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
47
Walter Mosley · 232 pages
Walter Mosley is one of the best-known writers in America. In his first book for young adults, Mosley deftly weaves historical and speculative fiction into a powerful narrative about the nature of freedom. 47 is a young slave boy living under the watchful eye of a brutal slave master. His life seems doomed until he meets a mysterious runaway slave, Tall John. Then, 47 finds himself swept up in a s