Books like The Nickel Boys

01

The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead · Historical fiction

The Underground Railroad takes a central metaphor of American history — the network of safe houses and abolitionists that helped enslaved people flee north — and makes it literal: Colson Whitehead imagines the railroad as an actual underground train system, with tunnels, platforms, and conductors.

A kindred historical fiction read.

02

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Bryan Stevenson · Memoir

Bryan Stevenson's memoir of his career as a capital defense attorney in Alabama, and specifically of his years working on the case of Walter McMillian — a Black man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Monroe County, Alabama — is simultaneously a riveting legal narrative and a sustained moral argument about the American criminal justice system's treatment of the poor and of Black defendants.

A kindred historical fiction read.

03

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander · Politics

Michelle Alexander's central argument is stark: the United States has not ended racial caste, it has merely redesigned it.

A kindred historical fiction read.

04

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.

A kindred historical fiction read.

05

Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup · Memoir

Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853, is the memoir of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped in 1841, sold into slavery in Louisiana, and held for twelve years before recovering his freedom.

A kindred historical fiction read.

06

Kindred

Octavia E. Butler · Science fiction

Dana, a Black woman living in California in 1976, is suddenly and involuntarily transported to the antebellum South.

Both dig into survival and complicity.

07

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.

A kindred historical fiction read.

08

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.

A kindred historical fiction read.

09

A Thousand Splendid Suns

Khaled Hosseini · Historical fiction

A Thousand Splendid Suns follows two Afghan women across nearly forty years of their country's turbulence: Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy merchant who is married off at fifteen to a much older man in Kabul, and Laila, a young woman from a different generation whose family is destroyed in a rocket strike during the civil war and who is subsequently forced into the same household.

A kindred historical fiction read.

10

Alias Grace

Margaret Atwood · Historical fiction

Alias Grace is based on the historical case of Grace Marks, a young Irish immigrant servant who was convicted in 1843, along with stable hand James McDermott, of the murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Upper Canada.

A kindred historical fiction read.

11

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr · Historical fiction

All the Light We Cannot See follows two children through the Second World War on a collision course neither can see coming.

A kindred historical fiction read.

12

Babel

R.F. Kuang · Historical fiction

Set in an alternate 1830s Oxford, Babel imagines a Royal Institute of Translation at the heart of the British Empire — a place where silver bars engraved with translation "match-words" generate the industrial magic that powers British supremacy.

A kindred historical fiction read.