18 books like The Vanishing Half
Homegoing
Homegoing is the debut historical fiction novel by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi, published in 2016. Each chapter in the novel follows a different descendant of an Asante woman named Maame, starting with her two daughters, who are half-sisters, separated by circumstance: Effia marries James Collins, the British governor in charge of Cape Coast Castle, while her half-sister Esi is held…
Shares: African American, Literary, Historical Fiction, History
Passing
First published to critical acclaim in 1929, Passing firmly established Nella Larsen's prominence among women writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
Irene Redfield, the novel's protagonist, is a woman with an enviable life. She and her husband, Brian, a prominent physician, share a comfortable Harlem town house with their sons. Her work arranging charity balls that gather Harlem's elite creates a…
Shares: Passing, African American women, Identity
The house behind the cedars
"The House Behind the Cedars tells of John and Lena Walden, mulatto siblings who pass for white in the postbellum American South. The drama that unfolds as they travel between black and white worlds constitutes a riveting portrait of the shifting and intractable nature of race in American life. This edition revitalizes a much-neglected masterpiece by one of our most important African-American…
Shares: Passing, African American women, History
A rap on race
(From the introduction) On August 25, 1970, anthropologist Margaret Mead and writer James Baldwin met for the first time to have three recorded conversations, totaling more than seven hours of tape that, once transcribed, would compose the book, A Rap on Race (1971). The Mead and Baldwin Book is an amazing account documenting the meeting of two of the twentieth century's paradigmatic thinkers and…
Shares: Race, African American, History
The secret life of bees
Sue Monk Kidd's ravishing debut novel has stolen the hearts of reviewers and readers alike with its strong, assured voice. Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest…
Shares: African American women, Sisters, Historical Fiction
Such a Fun Age
A striking and surprising debut novel from an exhilarating new voice, Such a Fun Age is a page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.
Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing…
Shares: African American women, Literary, Coming-of-age
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighbourhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared…
Shares: African American, Historical Fiction
The Idiot
Embarking on her freshman year at Harvard in the early tech days of the 1990s, a young artist and daughter of Turkish immigrants begins a correspondence with an older mathematics student from Hungary while struggling with her changing sense of self, first love and a daunting career prospect.
Shares: Identity, Literary, Coming-of-age
Kindred
Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more…
Shares: African American, African American women
Dark Day in the Deep Sea
Jack and Annie continue their quest for the secrets of happiness--secrets they need if they're going to save Merlin. But when the magic tree house leads them to a tiny deserted island in the middle of the ocean, they're not sure who needs help more--Merlin or themselves! The brother and sister team are soon rescued by a ship of explorers and scientists. But the crew isn't looking for the secrets…
Shares: Compassion, Historical Fiction
Sing, Unburied, Sing
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, Literary
Novels (Pudd'nhead Wilson / Those Extraordinary Twins)
The first work is the story of Roxana, a light-skinned slave who switches her baby with her master's.
Shares: Passing, Twins
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
A young slave woman attempting to protect her son from the horrors of slavery, switches her light-skinned infant with the master's white son.
This novel features a literary first — the use of fingerprinting to solve a crime.
Shares: Passing, Twins
Brood
Two teenagers struggle with a horrific family legacy in the sequel to Chase Novak's novel, Breed. Thirteen years ago, a radical fertility doctor helped bring Adam and Alice Twisden into the world. The treatment came at a great cost: it turned the twins' parents into barbarous animals and threatens to transform the children, too. As Adam and Alice find themselves on the brink of maturity, they…
Shares: Twins, Coming-of-age
Asymmetry
Explores the imbalances that spark and sustain dramatic human relations, tracing the overlapping stories of a young American editor's relationship with a famous older writer, an unexpected New York romance during the early years of the Iraq War and an Iraqi-American man who is detained by immigration officers in Heathrow.
Shares: Literary, Coming-of-age
Pan Michael An historical novel
The third and final book of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy takes a closer and more intimate look at one of the series’ protagonists: Pan Michael Volodyovski. The Polish Commonwealth has been through intense periods of war, and the peace that follows leaves one of its greatest heroes, Pan Michael, finally free to marry his beloved Panna Anusia. But in a twist of fate, she falls ill and dies, leaving…
Shares: Historical Fiction, History
St. George and St. Michael
It was the middle of autumn, and had rained all day. Through the lozenge-panes of the wide oriel window the world appeared in the slowly gathering dusk not a little dismal. The drops that clung trickling to the dim glass added rain and gloom to the landscape beyond, whither the eye passed, as if vaguely seeking that help in the distance, which the dripping hollyhocks and sodden sunflowers…
Shares: Historical Fiction, History
The little giant of Aberdeen County
When Truly Plaice's mother was pregnant, the town of Aberdeen joined together in betting how recordbreakingly huge the baby boy would ultimately be. The girl who proved to be Truly paid the price of her enormity; her father blamed her for her mother's death in childbirth, and was totally ill equipped to raise either this giant child or her polar opposite sister Serena Jane, the epitome of femine…
Shares: Sisters, Coming-of-age