Books like Absalom, Absalom!
Thomas Sutpen arrives in Mississippi in 1833 with a band of enslaved men to build a plantation and a dynasty, and the story of its destruction, told and retold by several narrators, becomes a reckoning with slavery and time.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Absalom, Absalom!
Go Down, Moses
Linked stories about the McCaslin family across generations, tracing the entangled Black and white branches of a Mississippi plantation.
The Sound and the Fury
Four sections, three of them narrated by the Compson brothers, one with an intellectual disability, tell the story of a Mississippi family's decline, and the fragmented telling enacts the disintegration.
Everything That Rises Must Converge
O'Connor's final story collection, published posthumously, with nine stories of grace and violence in the Jim Crow South.
Song of Solomon
Milkman Dead, the son of the richest Black family in a Michigan town, travels south in search of hidden gold and finds instead the story of his family and of an ancestor who could fly.
Reflections in a Golden Eye
On an army post in the South in peacetime, a repressed officer, his careless wife, her lover and a silent young private circle one another in a short novel of watching and obsession.
Other Voices, Other Rooms
Thirteen-year-old Joel Knox is sent to a decaying house in the Deep South to meet the father he has never seen, and is met by a nervous stepmother and a languid cousin who will not say where his father is.
The Violent Bear It Away
A fourteen-year-old boy raised by a prophetic great-uncle in rural Tennessee is torn between his destiny to baptise a cousin and his atheist uncle's rationalism.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
Ailey Pearl Garfield grows up between the city and the Georgia town of Chicasetta, where her mother's people have lived for generations, and as she grows older she traces her family back through slavery to the land's first people.
The Sweetness of Water
In Georgia in the last days of the Civil War, George Walker, a reclusive farmer grieving his son, takes on two newly freed brothers, Prentiss and Landry, to work his land.
In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead
In New Iberia, Louisiana, Detective Dave Robicheaux is hunting the killer of a young woman when a film crew shooting a Civil War picture nearby turns up the skeleton of a Black man he saw shot in chains decades before.
Outer Dark
In the Appalachian South, a brother and sister wander apart through a nightmarish landscape, she looking for the baby he left in the woods, while three murderous drifters move across the land.
Benang
Harley, a young Noongar man whose white grandfather set out to breed the Aboriginality out of the family, floats in the air as he tells his family's history in Western Australia.