Books like The Water Dancer
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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Water Dancer
Song Yet Sung
A runaway slave with prophetic visions is hunted across the marshes of Maryland's Eastern Shore in the 1850s.
The Underground Railroad
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.
The Known World
In antebellum Virginia, a freed Black man becomes a slaveholder himself, and the moral catastrophe of the institution devours everyone it touches.
Let Us Descend
Annis, the daughter of an enslaved woman and the man who owns them both, is sold away from the Carolina rice fields and marched south to the slave markets of New Orleans, and on the way a spirit of the wind, Aza, begins to speak to her.
The Confessions of Nat Turner
A fictionalised account of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner, told from inside the mind of a literate, tormented preacher.
Kindred
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.
Powers
Gavir, an enslaved boy in a city-state who has visions of the future, grows up loyal to the household that owns him, until a betrayal sends him in search of freedom, in the third book of the Annals of the Western Shore.
Property
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
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
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.
Horse
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.
Uncle Tom's Cabin
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.