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Recommendations based on Sag Harborby Colson Whitehead
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The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
An escaped slave's daring escape to freedom, fighting against the brutality of slavery.
The story is told in the third person, focusing mainly on Cora. Scattered single chapters also focus on Cora's mother Mabel, the slavecatcher Ridgeway, a reluctant slave sympathizer named Ethel, and ... (Wikipedia)
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline
by George Saunders
A collection of darkly comic stories, exploring the absurdities of life in a post-apocalyptic world.
In six stories and the novella, Bounty, Saunders introduces readers to people struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. ... (Goodreads)
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
by Junot Díaz
An exploration of love, identity, and the power of fate in a family's struggles and triumphs.
Oscar de León (nicknamed Oscar Wao, a bastardization of Oscar Wilde ) is an overweight Dominican growing up in Paterson, New Jersey. Oscar desperately wants to be successful with women but, from a ... (Wikipedia)
Lincoln in the Bardo
by George Saunders
A spiritual exploration of death, exploring the afterlife through the eyes of President Lincoln.
In his long-awaited first novel, American master George Saunders delivers his most original, transcendent, and moving work yet. Unfolding in a graveyard over the course of a single night, narrated by ... (Goodreads)
White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
A multi-generational saga exploring identity, race, and culture in modern-day London.
On New Year's Day 1975, Archie Jones, a 47-year-old Englishman whose disturbed Italian wife has just walked out on him, is attempting to take his own life by gassing himself in his car when a chance ... (Wikipedia)
The Waves
by Virginia Woolf
Inner musings of six characters in search of individual identity, expressed through the ebb and flow of the sea.
The novel follows its six narrators from childhood through adulthood. Woolf is concerned with the individual consciousness and the ways in which multiple consciousnesses can weave together. Bernard ... (Wikipedia)
Motherhood
by Sheila Heti
A woman contemplates whether or not to have a child, exploring the complexities and societal expectations surrounding motherhood.
From the author of How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”— Time Magazine ) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to ... (Goodreads)
Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
A tale of family, heritage, and identity, exploring the power of memory and its impact on the present.
Song of Solomon opens with the death of Robert Smith, an insurance agent and member of The Seven Days, an organization that kills white people in retaliation for the racial killing of black people. ... (Wikipedia)
Sing, Unburied, Sing
by Jesmyn Ward
A family's journey through the Mississippi Delta, confronting a traumatic past.
It is Jojo's thirteenth birthday. To step into his new role as a man, Jojo tries to bravely help his grandfather, Pop, kill a goat. Jojo ends up throwing up at the sight although Pop is sympathetic. ... (Wikipedia)
When You Reach Me
by Rebecca Stead
A young girl in 1970s New York City receives mysterious notes that seem to predict the future. She must unravel the mystery before it's too late.
Miranda is an ordinary sixth grader, until she starts receiving mysterious messages from somebody who knows all about her, including things that have not even happened yet. Each message brings her ... (Goodreads)
A Visit from the Goon Squad
by Jennifer Egan
A mosaic of characters, lives, and relationships as they intertwine and evolve over time.
Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. ... (Goodreads)
Zone One
by Colson Whitehead
A post-apocalyptic novel following a survivor of a zombie outbreak as he helps to clear out infected areas of New York City.
A virus has laid waste to civilization, turning the infected into flesh-eating and mortally contagious zombies. But events have stabilized, and the rebuilding process has begun. Over a three-day ... (Wikipedia)
Future Home of the Living God
by Louise Erdrich
A pregnant woman embarks on a journey to find safety in a world of deteriorating evolution.
Louise Erdrich paints a startling portrait of a young woman fighting for her life and her unborn child against oppressive forces that manifest in the wake of a cataclysmic event in this dystopian ... (Goodreads)
Telegraph Avenue
by Michael Chabon
Two friends navigate life's obstacles to keep their record store afloat in a changing neighborhood.
Set in 2004, Archy Stallings, who is black, and Nat Jaffe, who is Jewish, are proprietors of Brokeland Records, a record shop located in north Oakland for twelve years. Their used vinyl business is ... (Wikipedia)
Mama Day
by Gloria Naylor
An exploration of the power of faith and family in a small African-American community.
Mama Day centers around the characters George and Cocoa. Cocoa, whose real name is Ophelia, is a young southern woman living in New York who is still deeply connected to her family and ancestry, even ... (Wikipedia)
A Mercy
by Toni Morrison
An exploration of the human condition and the consequences of slavery in America.
In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in ... (Goodreads)
The 19th Wife
by David Ebershoff
A hybrid of historical fiction and detective novel, exploring the realities of polygamy.
Jordan Scott has been expelled from his fundamentalist sect in modern-day southern Utah, but returns to determine whether his mother killed his father. His mother is the 19th wife of his father. ... (Wikipedia)
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Spanning centuries, the intertwining stories of two African sisters, their descendants, and the legacy of slavery.
Effia is raised by her mother, Baaba, who is cruel to her. Nevertheless she works hard to please her mother. Known as a beauty, Effia is intended to be married to the future chief of her village, but ... (Wikipedia)
Juliet, Naked
by Nick Hornby
A story about a complex love triangle, set against a backdrop of music and fandom.
Duncan, an obsessive music fan, receives a CD of Juliet, Naked , an album of solo acoustic demos of the songs on the album Juliet by his favourite artist, Tucker Crowe. Duncan's girlfriend, Annie, ... (Wikipedia)
Scott Pilgrim, Volume 5: Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe
by Bryan Lee O'Malley
A young man's quest to save his true love from the clutches of seven evil exes.
Scott Pilgrim, a 23-year-old slacker, lives in Toronto with his roommate Wallace Wells. He is the bass player for Sex Bob-omb, an unsuccessful band consisting of himself, guitarist Stephen Stills, ... (Wikipedia)
Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler
A modern woman is thrown back in time, forced to confront the harsh realities of slavery.
Kindred scholars have noted that the novel's chapter headings suggest something "elemental, apocalyptic, archetypal about the events in the narrative," thus giving the impression that the main ... (Wikipedia)
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 2
by Alan Moore
A band of extraordinary heroes unite to save the Earth from a global threat.
On the planet Mars, John Carter and Gullivar Jones have assembled an alliance of Martian races to combat an invading race of non-Martian aliens called "Molluscs" (the aliens from H.G. Wells ', The ... (Wikipedia)
Swing Time
by Zadie Smith
Two brown girls dream of becoming dancers, but only one has talent. Their friendship is tested by ambition and the world's inequalities.
Beginning in 2008, the novel tells the story of two mixed-race, black and white, girls who meet in 1982 in a tap class in London . The unnamed narrator, who has a white, working-class father, and a ... (Wikipedia)
The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien
A collection of stories about the Vietnam War, interweaving the past and present.
In 1979, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato —a novel about the Vietnam War—won the National Book Award. In this, his second work of fiction about Vietnam, O'Brien's unique artistic vision is again ... (Goodreads)
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
A black man's journey towards self-actualization in a world of racial oppression.
The narrator, an unnamed black man, begins by describing his living conditions: an underground room wired with hundreds of electric lights, operated by power stolen from the city's electric grid. He ... (Wikipedia)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
by Haruki Murakami
A surreal journey of self-discovery, exploring the inner and outer worlds.
The first part, "The Thieving Magpie", begins with the narrator, Toru Okada, a low-key and unemployed lawyer's assistant, being tasked by his wife, Kumiko, to find their missing cat. Kumiko suggests ... (Wikipedia)
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
A day in the life of a high-society woman, delving into her inner thoughts and feelings.
Clarissa Dalloway goes around London in the morning, getting ready to host a party that evening. The nice day reminds her of her youth spent in the countryside in Bourton and makes her wonder about ... (Wikipedia)
Suite Française
by Irène Némirovsky
A story of love and loss set against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied France.
The first two stories of a masterwork once thought lost, written by a pre-WWII bestselling author who was deported to Auschwitz and died before her work could be completed. By the early l940s, when ... (Goodreads)
Her Body and Other Parties: Stories
by Carmen Maria Machado
Collection of surreal stories exploring the complexities of gender, sexuality and identity.
In Her Body and Other Parties , Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her ... (Goodreads)
The Likeness
by Tana French
A murder investigation reveals secrets of a young woman's past, threatening her present.
The story follows the efforts of detective Cassie Maddox to determine the circumstances surrounding the death of Lexie Madison, a young woman who is her doppelgänger . , The dead woman not only ... (Wikipedia)
