Books like Go Tell It on the Mountain
On his fourteenth birthday in 1930s Harlem, John Grimes struggles with his stern preacher father, the church and his own desires, while the prayers of his family reveal the histories that shaped them.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Go Tell It on the Mountain
World's Fair
A boy grows up in 1930s Bronx, and the World's Fair becomes the lens through which he sees his family, his neighbourhood, and the promise of American modernity.
This Side of Paradise
A Princeton undergraduate moves through love affairs and literary ambitions in the disillusioned aftermath of the Great War.
Brown Girl, Brownstones
Selina Boyce, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants in a Brooklyn brownstone during the Depression and the war, grows up caught between her dreaming father and her mother, who is set on buying the house whatever it costs.
Moon Palace
In 1969, Columbia student Marco Stanley Fogg inherits his late uncle's library, reads and sells it book by book until he is starving in Central Park, and a job as companion to a rich, blind, cantankerous old man named Thomas Effing leads him to his own family's secrets.
Billy Bathgate
A boy in 1930s New York enters the orbit of the gangster Dutch Schultz and discovers that the underworld's glamour conceals a machinery of violence.
The Poet X
Xiomara Batista, a Dominican American teenager in Harlem, pours everything she cannot say to her strict, devout mother into the poems she keeps in a notebook, until she is invited to join her school's slam poetry club.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
An Irish-American girl grows up poor in early-twentieth-century Williamsburg on her mother's stubbornness and her doomed father's charm, and the Brooklyn she walks to school in is its own weather.
Franny and Zooey
A college student in the middle of a spiritual breakdown retreats to her family's Manhattan apartment, and her actor brother tries to talk her back into the world.
Crossroads
In 1971 suburban Chicago, associate pastor Russ Hildebrandt and his family each struggle with faith, desire and a youth group called Crossroads, as their lives pull apart over a single winter.
Palace Walk
In Cairo at the end of the First World War, the merchant al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad rules his wife and children with an iron hand at home while spending his nights in music and drink.
The Bell Jar
A young woman's descent into depression in 1950s New York, told with razor wit and suffocating clarity.
Ancient Tillage
André, who has run away from his family's farm, is brought home by his older brother, and tells in a torrent of language why he left.