18 books like Paradise

What to read after Paradise — 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: Noirs américains, African American families, African American women, African Americans

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, Afro-Americans, African Americans, Domestic fiction

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, Afro-Americans, 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, Afro-Americans, African Americans, Domestic fiction

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, Afro-Americans, African Americans

Mama Day Gloria Naylor · 1988 · ★ 4.2 · 312p · ≈ 10h · Moderate Mama day is about many things. It's the story of Ophelia and George two black American's and how they fall in love in try to reconcile their differences of upbringing and culture. It's about the dying culture of Gullah on the Georgia sea islands and it is even a reworking of Shakespeare's Tempest. Shares: Afro-Americans, African American women, African Americans

Sula Toni Morrison · 1973 · ★ 4.1 · 188p · ≈ 6h · Moderate Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet as children in the small town of Medallion, Ohio. Their devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the… Shares: African American women, City and town life, African Americans, Domestic fiction

Leaving Atlanta Tayari Jones · 2002 · ★ 4.1 · 272p · ≈ 9h · Moderate "It was the end of summer, a summer during a two-year nightmare. African American children around Atlanta were vanishing, and twenty-nine would be murdered by the end of 1981. Like all kids across the city, fifth-grade classmates Tasha Baxter, Rodney Green, and Octavia Harrison were discovering that back-to-school now meant special safety lessons, indoor recess, and being thrown into a world… Shares: African American families, African Americans, Domestic fiction

In love & trouble Alice Walker · 1973 · 138p · ≈ 4h · Moderate The desires and fears of the American black woman are explored with compassion and understanding in these thirteen short stories. Admirers of The Color Purple will find in these stories more evidence of Walker's power to depict black women-women who vary greatly in background yet are bound together. Dating back to the early 1970s and 1980s, respectively, these short stories cover the Pulitzer… Shares: African American women, African Americans, Women

Going to Meet the Man James Baldwin · 1965 · ★ 4.4 · 226p · ≈ 7h · Moderate African-American fiction Shares: Afro-Americans, African Americans, Social conditions

Dust tracks on a road Zora Neale Hurston · 1942 · ★ 4.1 · 328p · ≈ 10h · Challenging xii, 308, 16 pages: 21 cm Shares: African American women, African Americans, Social conditions

To Take B. Love · 2017 · 82p · ≈ 2h · Moderate iii, 72 pages ; 20 cm Shares: African American women, African Americans

Passing by Samaria Sharon Ewell Foster · 1999 · 383p · ≈ 12h · Moderate Eighteen-year-old African-American Alena's sheltered life on her parent's Mississippi farm has not prepared her for the truth about racism, but a shocking discovery leads her to leave her home in 1919 and travel to Chicago in search of answers and justice. Shares: African American women, African Americans

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

Up from Slavery Booker T. Washington · 1900 · ★ 4.1 · 168p · ≈ 5h · Challenging Booker T. Washington, the most recognized national leader, orator and educator, emerged from slavery in the deep south, to work for the betterment of African Americans in the post Reconstruction period. "Up From Slavery" is an autobiography of Booker T. Washington's life and work, which has been the source of inspiration for all Americans. Washington reveals his inner most thoughts as he… Shares: Afro-Americans, 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

If Beale Street Could Talk James Baldwin · 1974 · ★ 4.3 · 197p · ≈ 6h · Moderate Like the blues -- sweet, sad and full of truth -- this masterly work of fiction rocks us with powerful emotions. In it are anger and pain, but above all, love -- affirmative love of a woman for her man, the sustaining love of a black family. Fonny, a talented young artist, finds himself unjustly arrested and locked in New York's infamous tombs. But his girlfriend, Tish, is determined to… Shares: Noirs américains, African Americans

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