Historical fiction · Similar reads

Books like The Known World

The Known World by Edward P. Jones is about slavery and its moral corruption, power and its distortions, memory and consequence. If that's what drew you in, here are 6 books that share its DNA — each summarized on Superbook, and ready to chat with in the app.

  1. Beloved
    Beloved

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    Beloved

    Toni Morrison · Literary fiction

    Beloved is set in post-Civil War Ohio, where Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, lives with her daughter Denver in a house shadowed by the ghost of a baby she killed rather than let be taken back into slavery.

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  2. The Warmth of Other Suns
    The Warmth of Other Suns

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    The Warmth of Other Suns

    Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

    Isabel Wilkerson's account of the Great Migration — the movement of six million Black Americans from the South to the North and West between 1915 and 1970 — is one of the most important works of narrative nonfiction published in the twenty-first century.

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  3. The Souls of Black Folk
    The Souls of Black Folk

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    The Souls of Black Folk

    W.E.B. Du Bois · History

    The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, is W.E.B.

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  4. Between the World and Me
    Between the World and Me

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    Between the World and Me

    Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

    Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

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  5. A Gentleman in Moscow
    A Gentleman in Moscow

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    A Gentleman in Moscow

    Amor Towles · Historical fiction

    In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced by a Bolshevik tribunal — not to death, but to permanent house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel.

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  6. A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities

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    A Tale of Two Cities

    Charles Dickens · Historical fiction

    A Tale of Two Cities is set against the French Revolution and follows three intertwined characters: Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who has renounced his title and family legacy; Lucie Manette, the daughter of a man who spent eighteen years imprisoned in the Bastille; and Sydney Carton, a dissolute English lawyer who loves Lucie without hope and knows he will never be the man Darnay already is.

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