Books like Twelve Years a Slave

01

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.

Both dig into identity.

02

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Malcolm X and Alex Haley · Memoir

The Autobiography of Malcolm X was assembled from a series of conversations between Malcolm X and the journalist Alex Haley, conducted over two years before Malcolm's assassination in February 1965.

A kindred memoir read.

03

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou · Memoir

Maya Angelou's first volume of autobiography covers her childhood and adolescence in Stamps, Arkansas and San Francisco during the 1930s and 1940s, ending with the birth of her son at age sixteen.

Both dig into identity.

04

Long Walk to Freedom

Nelson Mandela · Memoir

Nelson Mandela's autobiography traces his life from a rural Xhosa childhood in the Transkei to his release from prison in 1990 after twenty-seven years of incarceration, and ends with his election as South Africa's first democratically chosen president in 1994.

Both dig into identity.

05

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.

Both dig into justice.

06

Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

Suleika Jaouad · Memoir

Suleika Jaouad was twenty-two and newly graduated, living in Paris with her first real job and a boyfriend, when she was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.

Shares identity and survival with Twelve Years a Slave.

07

Hunger

Roxane Gay · Memoir

Hunger is Roxane Gay's memoir about her body, the trauma that shaped it, and the world's persistent refusal to accommodate it.

Shares identity and survival with Twelve Years a Slave.

08

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

Harriet Jacobs · Memoir

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent, is Harriet Jacobs's account of her life as an enslaved woman in North Carolina, her resistance to her enslaver's sexual harassment, her years in hiding, and her eventual escape to the North.

Shares slavery and freedom with Twelve Years a Slave.

09

Know My Name: A Memoir

Chanel Miller · Memoir

Know My Name is Chanel Miller's memoir of being sexually assaulted behind a dumpster at Stanford University in 2015, being identified publicly as only "Emily Doe" throughout the subsequent trial, and the experience of navigating a legal process while the perpetrator — Stanford swimmer Brock Turner — became the more visible subject of the story.

Shares identity and justice with Twelve Years a Slave.

10

Scar Tissue

Anthony Kiedis · Memoir

Scar Tissue is Anthony Kiedis's account of his life from a chaotic childhood in Michigan through the formation and commercial peak of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with addiction and recovery as the book's spine.

Shares identity and survival with Twelve Years a Slave.

11

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath · Memoir

The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only novel, published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, one month before Plath's death.

Shares identity and survival with Twelve Years a Slave.

12

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank · Memoir

Anne Frank's diary, kept during the two years she spent hiding with her family in a concealed Amsterdam apartment, stands as one of the most widely read first-person accounts of the Holocaust.

Shares identity and survival with Twelve Years a Slave.