18 books like The man in my basement

What to read after The man in my basement — books similar to it, matched on shared themes.

Little Green Walter Mosley · 2013 · ★ 4.5 · 291p · ≈ 9h · Moderate Surviving a near-fatal car wreck and cruising the streets of the Sunset Strip during the heyday of the late 1960s, Easy Rawlins investigates the disappearance of a young African-American, a case that is complicated by Rawlins's changing perspectives. Shares: African American men, Los angeles, African Americans

Invisible Man Ralph Ellison · 1952 · ★ 3.9 · 450p · ≈ 15h · Moderate Invisible Man is the story of a young black man from the South who does not fully understand racism in the world. Filled with hope about his future, he goes to college, but gets expelled for showing one of the white benefactors the real and seamy side of black existence. He moves to Harlem and becomes an orator for the Communist party, known as the Brotherhood. In his position, he is both… Shares: African American men, Race Relations, 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: African American men, African American fiction, African Americans

DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS (Easy Rawlins Mysteries) Walter Mosley · 1990 · ★ 4.0 · 219p · ≈ 7h · Moderate Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins has few illusions about the world--at least not about the world of a young black veteran in the late 1940s in Southern California. His stint in the Army didn't do anything to dissuade him from his belief that justice doesn't come cheap, especially for men like him. "I thought there might be some justice for a black man if he had money to grease it," Easy says. Fired… Shares: African American men, Los angeles, African Americans, Mystery

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 fiction, African Americans

13 Steps Down Ruth Rendell · 2004 · ★ 3.7 · 410p · ≈ 13h · Moderate Mix Cellini has just moved into a flat in a decaying house in Nottinghill, where he plans to pursue his two abiding passions--supermodel Nerissa Nash, whom he worships from afar, and the life of serial killer Reggie Christie, hanged fifty years earlier for murdering at least eight women. Gwendolen Chawcer, Mix's eighty-year-old landlady has few interests beside her old books and her new tenant.… Shares: Landlord and tenant, Thriller, Mystery

Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick Zora Neale Hurston · 2020 · ★ 4.3 · 192p · ≈ 6h · Moderate From “one of the greatest writers of our time” (Toni Morrison)—the author of Barracoon and Their Eyes Were Watching God—a collection of remarkable stories, including eight “lost” Harlem Renaissance tales now available to a wide audience for the first time. New York Times’ Booksto Watch forBuzzfeed’sMost Anticipated BooksNewsweek’sMost Anticipated BooksForbes.com’sMost Anticipated BooksE!’sTop… Shares: African American fiction, African Americans

Redbone Ron Stodghill · 2006 · ★ 4.2 · 256p · ≈ 8h · Moderate Lance Herndon was at the top of his game in 1996. At age forty-one he was a self-made millionaire, the owner of Access, Inc., a successful information-systems consulting company. As a prominent member of Atlanta's young, wealthy, and powerful set, he was surrounded by black Atlanta's "beautiful people." But when he failed to show up for work one day, friends and family started to worry. Their… Shares: African American men, African Americans

The Reformatory Tananarive Due · 2023 · ★ 4.4 · 576p · ≈ 19h · Moderate Gracetown, Florida - June 1950 Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory. Robbie has a talent… Shares: African American fiction, Thriller, Mystery

Farewell, My Lovely Raymond Chandler · 1940 · ★ 4.1 · 249p · ≈ 8h · Challenging This is one of Chandler’s most famous crime novels featuring the detective Philip Marlowe, who’s about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard. Shares: Los angeles, Mystery

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 fiction, African Americans

The werewolf principle Clifford D. Simak · 1967 · ★ 3.8 · 213p · ≈ 7h · Moderate Andrew Blake is found in a space capsule on a distant planet and is brought back to an unfamiliar Earth, where antigravity devices have replaced the wheel, and houses talk and even fly! Yet nothing is as strange as Blake's own feelings. Tormented by eerie sensations and loss of memory, he doesn't know who he really is or exactly where he has come from. His destiny only begins to grow… Shares: Identity, Mystery

Your House Will Pay Steph Cha · 2019 · ★ 4.0 · 320p · ≈ 10h · Moderate "In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it's been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She's distraught that her sister hasn't spoken to their mother in… Shares: Los angeles, African Americans

Native Son Richard Wright · 1940 · ★ 4.1 · 420p · ≈ 14h · Challenging Native Son (1940) is a novel written by the American author Richard Wright. It tells the story of 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in utter poverty in a poor area on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s. ---------- Also contained in: Early Works Shares: African American men, African Americans

The scapegoat Daphne du Maurier · 1900 · ★ 4.0 · 351p · ≈ 11h · Challenging Someone jolted my elbow as I drank and said, 'Je vous demande pardon, ' and as I moved to give him space he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realized, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well.I was looking at myself."Two men--one English, the other French--meet by chance in a provincial railway station and are… Shares: Psychological, Thriller

Dark Matter Blake Crouch · 2016 · ★ 4.1 · 352p · ≈ 11h · Moderate One night after an evening out, Jason Dessen, forty-year-old physics professor living with his wife and son in Chicago, is kidnapped at gunpoint by a masked man, driven to an abandoned industrial site and injected with a powerful drug. As he wakes, a man Jason's never met smiles down at him and says, "Welcome back, my friend." But this life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife; his… Shares: Psychological, Thriller, Mystery

Yellow Wife Sadeqa Johnson · 2021 · ★ 4.4 · 288p · ≈ 9h · Moderate Born on a plantation in Charles City, Virginia, Pheby Delores Brown has lived a relatively sheltered life. Shielded by her mother’s position as the estate’s medicine woman and cherished by the Master’s sister, she is set apart from the others on the plantation, belonging to neither world. She’d been promised freedom on her eighteenth birthday, but instead of the idyllic life she imagined with… Shares: African American fiction, 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: African American fiction, African Americans

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