Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Song of Solomon
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.
Go Down, Moses
Linked stories about the McCaslin family across generations, tracing the entangled Black and white branches of a Mississippi plantation.
Beloved
In 1873 Ohio, Sethe, who escaped slavery eighteen years earlier, lives with her daughter Denver in a house haunted by the ghost of her baby, until a young woman calling herself Beloved arrives.
Swamplandia!
The teenage daughter of a failing Florida alligator-wrestling theme park family sets off through the Everglades to rescue her sister.
Tar Baby
A successful Black model visiting her wealthy white patrons on a Caribbean island meets a drifter who upends her sense of self.
Memphis
In 1995 Joan, ten, flees with her mother and younger sister to her mother's family home in Memphis, where three generations of women have lived and survived.
Invisible Man
A nameless Black narrator, living underground in a hole lit by stolen electricity, tells how he went from a Southern college to Harlem and a political brotherhood, and came to see himself as invisible.
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Thirteen-year-old Jojo, his toddler sister, and their drug-addicted mother drive across Mississippi to collect his white father from Parchman prison, and the ghost of a boy who died there rides home with them.
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.
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.
Salvage the Bones
A pregnant fifteen-year-old in rural Mississippi weathers Hurricane Katrina with her brothers, her fighting dogs, and a ferocity that refuses to break.
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford comes back to her Florida town and tells her friend the story of her three marriages, from a loveless arranged match to a short, joyous, doomed love in the Everglades.