Books like God Help the Child
A striking dark-skinned Black woman confronts the mother who rejected her as a child and the damage that rejection left behind.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of God Help the Child
The Bluest Eye
A young Black girl in 1940s Ohio prays for blue eyes, and her wish exposes the way American beauty standards destroy the people they exclude.
Home
A traumatised Black Korean War veteran travels across 1950s America to save his sister from a medical experiment.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Angelou's Stamps, Arkansas childhood under Jim Crow, the pastor-grandmother's store, the trauma that silenced her, and the teacher who taught her back into language.
Pretend I'm Dead
A housecleaner in Taos, New Mexico drifts through odd jobs and stranger relationships, narrating her life with deadpan humour and unacknowledged pain.
Such a Fun Age
A twenty-five-year-old Black babysitter is publicly accused of kidnapping the white toddler in her care, and everyone's performative allyship collapses.
Heavy
Kiese Laymon writes a memoir to his mother about growing up Black in Mississippi, about weight, gambling, abuse and love, and the lies they told to survive.
Redeployment
Twelve stories from Marines who served in Iraq, capturing the moral vertigo of modern warfare with precision and devastating honesty.
An American Marriage
Celestial and Roy are newlyweds in Atlanta with bright futures when Roy is sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he did not commit, and as the years pass, she finds comfort in Andre, her childhood friend and their best man.
Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?
When Kitty Karr, a white star of Hollywood's golden age, dies, she leaves her fortune to the St. John sisters, three wealthy young Black women in Los Angeles, and Elise, a celebrity in her own right, is left to settle Kitty's affairs and the questions that follow.
Real Life
Wallace, a queer Black biochemistry graduate student from Alabama at a mostly white Midwestern university, spends a late-summer weekend in which his friendships, his work and his past are all tested.
Hell of a Book
A Black author on a book tour and a boy fleeing violence alternate chapters in a novel about race, storytelling, and whose pain gets to be seen.
A Lesson Before Dying
In 1940s Louisiana a young Black teacher is asked to visit a man sentenced to death for a killing he did not commit, so that he can face the electric chair as a man rather than as what his own lawyer called him.