Books like The Sound and the Fury
Four sections, three of them narrated by the Compson brothers, one with an intellectual disability, tell the story of a Mississippi family's decline, and the fragmented telling enacts the disintegration.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Sound and the Fury
As I Lay Dying
A poor Mississippi family transports their dead mother's body across the county for burial, and the journey becomes a darkly comic, hallucinatory odyssey.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Waves
Six friends speak in turn from childhood to old age in soliloquies that read like prose poetry, while interludes trace the sun's course across a single day over the sea.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Ballad of the Sad Café
In a dreary Southern mill town the formidable Miss Amelia Evans opens a café after a hunchbacked stranger turns up claiming to be her cousin, until her ex-husband comes home from prison.