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Books like The Confessions of Nat Turner

William Styron · 1967 · US · historical fiction · literary fiction
★ 3.96 Goodreads · 15,399 ratings

A fictionalised account of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, told from inside the mind of a literate, tormented preacher.

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12 books for readers of The Confessions of Nat Turner

Property

Valerie Martin · 2003 · US 98% match ★ 3.70 Goodreads · 6,028 ratings
shares: antebellum, slavery, Southern · interior, dark

In 1828 Louisiana, Manon Gaudet, a sugar planter's wife who hates her husband, wants above all to be rid of Sarah, the enslaved woman he has made his mistress.

The Invention of Wings

Sue Monk Kidd · 2014 · US 97% match ★ 4.26 Goodreads · 340,331 ratings
shares: antebellum, slavery, rebellion · interior, dark

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.

James

Percival Everett · 2024 · US 97% match ★ 4.41 Goodreads · 610,217 ratings
shares: antebellum, slavery, Southern · interior, dark

Huckleberry Finn retold by Jim, an enslaved man who flees down the Mississippi when he learns he is about to be sold, and who hides his intelligence behind the dialect white people expect to hear.

The Water Dancer

Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2019 · US 96% match ★ 4.06 Goodreads · 122,060 ratings
shares: antebellum, slavery, Southern · interior, dark

A young enslaved man discovers he has the power to move through water and memory, and uses it to escape a Virginia plantation on the eve of the Civil War.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe · 1852 · US 96% match ★ 3.92 Goodreads · 247,843 ratings
shares: antebellum, slavery, Southern, religion · dark, earnest

The anti-slavery novel that stirred the North before the Civil War: when a Kentucky plantation owner sells two enslaved people to pay his debts, Eliza flees with her son across the frozen Ohio River and Uncle Tom is sold south.

The Known World

Edward P. Jones · 2003 · US 96% match ★ 3.84 Goodreads · 46,567 ratings
shares: antebellum, slavery, Southern · dark, morally murky

In antebellum Virginia, a freed Black man becomes a slaveholder himself, and the moral catastrophe of the institution devours everyone it touches.

Horse

Geraldine Brooks · 2022 · US 96% match ★ 4.23 Goodreads · 226,484 ratings
shares: antebellum, slavery, Southern · earnest, realist

The story of Lexington, the most celebrated racehorse in nineteenth-century America, and Jarret, the enslaved groom who raised him, connects to a 1950s New York art dealer and, in 2019, to a Smithsonian scientist and a Nigerian-American art historian who uncover their story.

Song Yet Sung

James McBride · 2008 · US 96% match ★ 4.06 Goodreads · 6,365 ratings
shares: antebellum, slavery, Southern · dark, earnest

A runaway slave with prophetic visions is hunted across the marshes of Maryland's Eastern Shore in the 1850s.

Light in August

William Faulkner · 1932 · US 96% match ★ 3.95 Goodreads · 68,977 ratings
shares: Southern, racial, brutal, religion · interior, dark

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 Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead · 2016 · US 96% match ★ 4.06 Goodreads · 461,978 ratings
shares: antebellum, slavery, Southern · dark, cold

Cora, enslaved on a Georgia plantation, escapes on an underground railroad that is a real train beneath the earth, and each state where she surfaces shows her a different version of America.

Kindred

Octavia E. Butler · 1979 · US 96% match ★ 4.31 Goodreads · 297,528 ratings
shares: antebellum, slavery, Southern · dark, earnest

A modern Black woman is repeatedly pulled back in time to the antebellum South, where she must save the life of her white ancestor to ensure her own existence.

Sacred Hunger

Barry Unsworth · 1992 · UK 96% match ★ 4.13 Goodreads · 7,684 ratings
shares: slavery, rebellion, brutal · dark, idea-driven

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.