Books like Segu
In the late eighteenth century, the family of Dousika Traore, a nobleman of the Bambara kingdom of Segu in what is now Mali, is scattered by Islam, the slave trade and colonialism.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Segu
Homegoing
Two half-sisters born in eighteenth-century Ghana never meet: Effia marries a British slaver and lives in comfort at Cape Coast Castle, while Esi is imprisoned in its dungeons and shipped to America, and the novel follows their descendants, one chapter each, to the present.
The Old Drift
In 1904 at the Old Drift, a settlement on the Zambezi near Victoria Falls, an Englishman's blunder sets three families, African, European and Indian, on paths that will cross over the next century in Zambia and into its near future.
Cane River
Drawn from the author's own family, the lives of four generations of women of colour along the Cane River in Louisiana, from Elisabeth, born into slavery, to her great-granddaughter Emily, across a century.
Granada
In Granada after its fall to Ferdinand and Isabella, a family of Muslim bookbinders lives through the burning of their books and the forced conversions that follow.
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 March
Sherman's March to the Sea becomes a panoramic novel of the Civil War's end, seen through the eyes of soldiers, slaves, and civilians swept up in the destruction.
Celestial Bodies
Three sisters in the Omani village of al-Awafi, Mayya, Asma and Khawla, marry and live through their country's changes, from the last years of slavery to the coming of oil money.
The Harafish
The saga of the al-Nagi family, generations of champions and villains who rise and fall as protectors of a Cairo alley, beginning with Ashur, a foundling raised by a blind sheikh.
The Covenant of Water
In Kerala from 1900 to the 1970s, a twelve-year-old girl married to a widower she has never met founds a family that loses someone to drowning in every generation, and her granddaughter grows up to become a doctor determined to find out why.
Sacred Hunger
In 1752 a Liverpool merchant builds a slave ship, the Liverpool Merchant, and his nephew Matthew Paris, a doctor ruined by scandal, goes aboard as its surgeon.
The Peasants
A year in the life of the village of Lipce, autumn to summer, centred on the rich widowed farmer Maciej Boryna, his marriage to the young beauty Jagna and his son Antek's fury.
Desertion
In 1899 an Englishman, Martin Pearce, stumbles out of the desert into a small town on the East African coast, is nursed back to health by a shopkeeper's family, and falls in love with the shopkeeper's sister.