Books like Light in August
A pregnant woman, a disgraced minister, and an outsider collide in a Mississippi town, and Faulkner uses their intersecting stories to expose the violence of Southern racial and religious codes.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Light in August
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.
Intruder in the Dust
A Black man accused of murdering a white man in Yoknapatawpha County gets help proving his innocence from a teenage boy and an elderly aunt.
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.
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.
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.
A Feast of Snakes
In Mystic, Georgia, during the annual rattlesnake roundup, a former high school football star stuck with a liquor-store job and a broken marriage feels the weekend's frenzy pushing him towards violence.
The Confessions of Nat Turner
A fictionalised account of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, told from inside the mind of a literate, tormented preacher.
The Little Friend
Twelve years after her brother was found hanged in the family yard, a fierce twelve-year-old in 1970s Mississippi decides she knows who killed him and sets out for revenge.
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.
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.
Child of God
A necrophiliac cave-dweller in rural Tennessee commits unspeakable acts, and McCarthy refuses to look away or moralise.