18 books like Leaving Atlanta

What to read after Leaving Atlanta — books similar to it, matched on shared themes.

Soul kiss Shay Youngblood · 1997 · ★ 4.0 · 207p · ≈ 6h · Moderate Left by her mother in the care of her aunts at the age of seven, Mariah dreams of her mother's return and of the father she has never met, eventually beginning a correspondence with him that leads to a tumultuous visit when she turns fourteen. A first novel. Shares: African American families, Georgia, African Americans, Bildungsromans

River, Cross My Heart Breena Clarke · 1999 · ★ 3.5 · 256p · ≈ 8h · Moderate The impact of a child's drowning on a black family in 1925 Washington, especially on the 12-year-old sister who was baby-sitting the girl. Told against the background of the lot of African Americans at the time. Shares: African American families, African Americans, Domestic fiction

Cop Town Karin Slaughter · 2012 · ★ 3.9 · 416p · ≈ 13h · Moderate "In 1974, the Atlanta Police Department is investigating a serial cop killer hardly welcomes women, so they partner Kate and Maggie to isolate them from the action. But the move will backfire, putting them right at the heart of it"-- Shares: Atlanta, Serial murders

Downtown Anne Rivers Siddons · 1994 · ★ 3.8 · 621p · ≈ 20h · Moderate Set on the cusp of the country's great social movements - youth, women's, peace, and civil rights - in the year before the love turned to anger and the peace to militancy, Downtown is the story of Smoky O'Donnell, her career and her heart. When Smoky arrives in Atlanta in 1966, after an airless lifetime back in Savannah, she is at once thrilled and chastened by this dazzling, hectic young city… Shares: Atlanta, Bildungsromans

Nora, Nora Anne Rivers Siddons · 2000 · 263p · ≈ 8h · Moderate "Peyton is not ready to share her widowed father with anyone, let alone a barely remembered cousin who just rolled into town, a cousin who smokes cigarettes and drives a pink Thunderbird. However, her father seems to like Nora well enough, and she does make for good conversation at the Losers Club, and prim Aunt Augusta hates her, which raises Nora slightly in Peyton's esteem. Maybe she isn't so… Shares: Georgia, Bildungsromans

And this too shall pass E. Lynn Harris · 1996 · ★ 4.3 · 347p · ≈ 11h · Moderate A stellar quarterback, an ambitious sportscaster. What happens when rising stars collide?In And This Too Shall Pass, Harris takes us into the locker rooms and newsrooms of Chicago, where four lives are about to intersect in romance and scandal. At the heart of the novel is the celibate Zurich, a rookie quarterback for the Chicago Cougars whose trajectory for superstardom is interrupted by a… Shares: African American families, African Americans

Roots Alex Haley · 1861 · ★ 4.4 · 476p · ≈ 15h · Challenging Roots is a novel written by Alex Haley and published in 1976. It portrays the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent and sold into slavery in the United States, and follows his life and the lives of his alleged descendants in the U.S. down to Haley. The release of the novel, combined with its hugely popular television adaptation, Roots (1977), led to a cultural… Shares: African American families, African Americans

Dirty Jersey Phillip Thomas Duck · 2008 · 253p · ≈ 8h · Moderate A chance encounter with Fiasco, one of the hottest rappers around, gives Eric Posey entry into a world where he is suddenly cool and has access to anything he's ever wanted, for the price of his sister, Kenya. Shares: African American families, African Americans

Sing, Unburied, Sing Jesmyn Ward · 2017 · ★ 4.0 · 304p · ≈ 10h · Moderate A SEARING AND PROFOUND SOUTHERN ODYSSEY BY NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER JESMYN WARD In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through… Shares: African American families, African Americans

Song of Solomon Toni Morrison · 1634 · ★ 4.4 · 353p · ≈ 11h · Demanding Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s… Shares: African American families, African Americans, Domestic fiction

Paradise Toni Morrison · 1997 · ★ 4.4 · 336p · ≈ 11h · Moderate "Rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year's Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what… Shares: African American families, African Americans, Domestic fiction

Darktown Thomas Mullen · 2016 · ★ 4.0 · 371p · ≈ 12h · Moderate "Responding to orders from on high, the Atlanta Police Department is forced to hire its first black officers, including war veterans Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith. The newly minted policemen are met with deep hostility by their white peers: they aren't allowed to arrest white suspects, drive squad cars, or set foot in the police headquarters. When a black woman who was last seen in a car driven by… Shares: Atlanta, African Americans

Lightning men Thomas Mullen · 2017 · ★ 4.1 · 374p · ≈ 12h · Moderate "Reads like the best of James Ellroy."--Publishers Weekly (starred review, on Darktown) "Mullen is a wonderful architect of intersecting plotlines and unexpected answers."--The Washington Post, on Darktown From the acclaimed author of The Last Town on Earth comes the gripping follow-up to Darktown. Officer Denny Rakestraw and "Negro Officers" Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith have their hands full in… Shares: Atlanta, African Americans

A Raisin in the Sun Lorraine Hansberry · 1958 · ★ 3.9 · 146p · ≈ 4h · Moderate This groundbreaking play starred Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeill, Ruby Dee and Diana Sands in the Broadway production which opened in 1959. Set on Chicago's South Side, the plot revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of the Younger family: son Walter Lee, his wife Ruth, his sister Beneatha, his son Travis and matriarch Lena, called Mama. When her deceased… Shares: African American families, African Americans

Triptych Karin Slaughter · 2006 · ★ 4.1 · 396p · ≈ 13h · Moderate A superb stand-alone thriller by the #1 bestselling author of FaithlessWhen Atlanta police detective Michael Ormewood is called out to a murder scene at the notorious Grady Homes, he finds himself faced with one of the the most brutal killings of his career: Aleesha Monroe is found in the stairwell in a pool of her own blood, her body horribly mutilated.As a one-off killing it's shocking, but… Shares: Atlanta, Serial murders

The Between Tananarive Due · 1995 · ★ 4.0 · 288p · ≈ 9h · Moderate The Between is a 1995 horror novel by Tananarive Due and her debut novel. It follows a middle-class African-American husband and father who has lived with the belief that he cheated death as a child. When his family becomes the target of racist threats, he suffers a psychological breakdown intertwined with supernatural elements that blur the boundary between reality and death. It was nominated… Shares: African American families, African Americans

Push Sapphire · 1996 · ★ 3.9 · 163p · ≈ 5h · Moderate Precious Jones, an illiterate sixteen-year-old, has up until now been invisible: invisible to the father who rapes her and the mother who batters her and to the authorities who dismiss her as just one more of Harlem's casualties. But when Precious, pregnant with a second child by her father, meets a determined and highly radical teacher, we follow her on a journey of education and enlightenment… Shares: African Americans, Bildungsromans, Domestic fiction

Nightcrawling Leila Mottley · 2022 · ★ 3.9 · 288p · ≈ 9h · Moderate NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK • A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system. This debut of a blazingly original voice “bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole” (Tommy Orange, author of There There).A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The… Shares: African Americans, Bildungsromans

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