Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
Milkman Dead, a restless man from a Black family in mid-century Michigan, sets out to find his family's hidden gold, in a lyrical, mythic novel by the same author.
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Books like Beloved
Beloved, by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, is a haunting novel about a formerly enslaved woman and her family in Ohio after the Civil War. These seven books explore slavery, memory and Black American lives, from lyrical to harrowing.
Books to read next
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
Letters from a young Black woman in rural Georgia trace her life, in a novel of resilience that includes sexual and physical abuse.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford tells a friend the story of her three marriages and her search for her own voice in early 20th-century Florida, with some domestic violence.
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler
A Black woman in 1976 Los Angeles is pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation, in a gripping novel with brutal violence, including sexual violence.
The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead
A young woman escapes a Georgia plantation on a literal railroad running beneath the ground, in an inventive novel with graphic violence.
Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi
The story follows two branches of one family from 18th-century Ghana to modern America, in short chapters about slavery and its legacy.
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward
On a road trip to collect a father from a Mississippi prison, a Black boy and his mother are haunted by a ghost, in a lyrical novel with drug use and racist violence.
How to choose
Most of these books deal with slavery or racism and contain violence, so choose by how much you want to read right now. For more Morrison, start with Song of Solomon, a lyrical family quest. If the haunting in Beloved stayed with you, try Sing, Unburied, Sing, or Kindred, which takes a time-travel route into slavery. The Underground Railroad and Homegoing are the most structured: an inventive escape story and a family saga told one descendant per chapter. The Color Purple and Their Eyes Were Watching God are about Black women finding their own voices, and both include domestic abuse. Beloved deals with slavery, racial violence and the violent death of a child, so read the content notes first if those are hard for you.
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