Books like To Kill a Mockingbird

01

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Richard Rothstein · History

Richard Rothstein's The Color of Law makes a precise and uncomfortable argument: residential segregation in American cities was not the result of private prejudice or individual choice but of explicit, deliberate government policy at the federal, state, and local levels.

A kindred literary 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 literary fiction read.

03

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.

A kindred literary fiction read.

04

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's second book proposes a reframing of American racial hierarchy: rather than thinking of racism primarily as prejudice, she argues that the United States has operated as a caste society, with Black Americans at the bottom of a rigidly maintained hierarchy similar in its structure — though different in its specific mechanisms — to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

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 literary fiction read.

06

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan · Literary fiction

Small Things Like These is a novella set in the Irish town of New Ross in 1985.

Both dig into moral courage.

07

A Time to Kill

John Grisham · Thriller

In Clanton, Mississippi, two white men rape and nearly kill ten-year-old Tonya Hailey.

Both dig into racial injustice.

08

The Plot Against America

Philip Roth · Historical fiction

In Philip Roth's alternate history, Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election on an America First platform, negotiates non-aggression agreements with Hitler and Hirohito, and begins a systematic program of quiet antisemitic policy that gradually shifts the conditions of Jewish American life.

Both dig into childhood and innocence.

09

The Turn of the Screw

Henry James · Horror

A young governess is sent to an isolated English country house to care for two children, Miles and Flora, whose guardian — a charming, absent man in London — has made clear he does not want to be bothered.

Both dig into childhood and innocence.

10

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway · Literary fiction

A Farewell to Arms is set during the First World War in northern Italy and follows Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps, who falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse.

A kindred literary fiction read.

11

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry · Literary fiction

A Fine Balance is set in an unnamed Indian city during Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–1977, a period of suspended democracy, forced sterilization, and slum clearances that is barely taught in the West and barely taught in India.

A kindred literary fiction read.

12

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · Literary fiction

A Little Life follows four men from college into middle age and beyond — Willem, an actor; JB, a painter; Malcolm, an architect; and Jude, a lawyer with a past that is revealed in increasingly devastating detail as the novel progresses.

A kindred literary fiction read.