Books like The Color Purple
A young Black woman in rural Georgia finds her voice and her freedom through sisterhood, love, and the slow, fierce work of self-creation.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Color Purple
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.
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.
Bastard Out of Carolina
Ruth Anne 'Bone' Boatwright grows up among the hard-drinking, fiercely loyal Boatwright clan of Greenville, South Carolina, while her mother's new husband turns her childhood into a fight to survive.
Ellen Foster
Eleven-year-old Ellen tells how she got through her mother's death and her father's neglect in rural North Carolina, and how she went looking for a new family and took its name.
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.
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.
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.
The Invention of Wings
On her eleventh birthday in Charleston in 1803, Sarah Grimké is given ten-year-old Hetty 'Handful' Grimké as her maid, and over thirty-five years the two women, one who will become an abolitionist and one enslaved in her household, tell their parallel stories.
A Thousand Acres
A modern retelling of King Lear set on an Iowa farm, where a father's decision to divide his land among three daughters unleashes buried secrets and destruction.
The Prince of Tides
A Southern football coach goes to New York to help his suicidal twin sister's psychiatrist understand the family, and the family turns out to be much worse than either of them told.
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.
The Calamity Club
In Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, Meg, an eleven-year-old left by her mother at the county orphan asylum for girls, and Birdie, who has come to town to beg her socialite sister for money to save the family home, find their lives tangling together in the depths of the Depression.