What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorHomegoing
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
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 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.
Queen
Alex Haley, David Stevens · 735 pages
Wolf by the Ears
Ann Rinaldi · 252 pages
Harriet Hemings, rumored to be the daughter of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, one of his black slaves, struggles with the problems facing her--to escape from the velvet cage that is Monticello, or to stay, and thus remain a slave.
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.
Hawaii
James A. Michener · 988 pages
Hawaii's prehistory and history appears through the eyes of its natives, missionaries and Asians who came to influence it.
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
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 Twelve Tribes of Hattie
Ayana Mathis · 279 pages
A novel about a mother's courage, sacrifice and love, set against the volatile history of twentieth century America. When Hattie clambered from a train, her skirt still hemmed with Georgia mud and the dream of Philadelphia sitting round as a marble in her mouth, she couldn't guess that two years later, aged sixteen, she'd be fighting to keep her baby twins alive. Saddled with a husband who will br
Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner · 378 pages
The story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness. He was a man, Faulkner said, "who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him."
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
The Right-Hand Shore
Christopher Tilghman · 368 pages
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
The Chaneysville Incident
David Bradley · 442 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
Neverwas
Kelly Moore, Tucker Reed, Larkin Reed · 310 pages
At her family's Maryland home, in a world where colonists lost the 1776 Insurrection, Sarah Parsons and her friend Jackson share visions of a different existence and, having remembered how things ought to be, plan a daring mission to set them right. At her family's Maryland home, where colonists lost the 1776 Insurrection, Sarah Parsons and her friend Jackson share visions of a different existenc
Long Division
Kiese Laymon · 304 pages
Kiese Laymon's debut novel is a Twain-esque exploration of celebrity, authorship, violence, religion, and coming of age in Post-Katrina Mississippi, written in a voice that's alternately funny, lacerating, and wise. The book contains two interwoven stories. In the first, it's 2013: after an on-stage meltdown during a nationally televised quiz contest, 14-year-old Citoyen "City" Coldson becomes an
The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss
Edmund de Waal · 368 pages
Traces the parallel stories of nineteenth-century art patron Charles Ephrussi and his unique collection of 360 miniature netsuke Japanese ivory carvings, documenting Ephrussi's relationship with Marcel Proust and the impact of the Holocaust on his cosmopolitan family.
The Feast of All Saints
Anne Rice · 640 pages
Set in 1840's New Orleans, this historical novel traces the journey of the community of free people of color who were feared and ignored by whites. Suspended between worlds of black and white, finding stability only int their own community, they live in tension and ambiguity that form their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. The protagonist is a 14 year old boy named Marcel with on
Miss Katie's Rosewood
Michael R. Phillips · 343 pages