Books Like James

Why Each Pick

Beloved by Toni Morrison

For slavery written from the inside. Sethe, who escaped slavery, lives in Ohio after the Civil War with a daughter and the ghost of the child she lost. Like James, it gives the people slavery tried to erase their full inner lives. Morrison's novel is a ghost story, dreamlike and slower, with none of Everett's humor. Content note: graphic violence, including sexual violence, and the death of a child.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

For a narrator who learns that white America sees only the role it expects of him. Ellison's unnamed narrator moves from the South to Harlem, trying on identities and discovering he is invisible to almost everyone. It shares James's interest in masks and in what a Black man must perform to survive. It is longer, at 581 pages, set in the twentieth century, and more surreal.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

For a novel where language and voice are the whole point. Janie Crawford tells a friend the story of her three marriages and her search for independence in early twentieth-century Florida. Hurston writes her characters' speech in rich Southern dialect, a fascinating contrast with James, where dialect is a performance Jim puts on for white listeners. It is a love story, far gentler, at 219 pages.

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

For another prize-winning retelling of a classic. Kingsolver moves David Copperfield to modern Appalachia, where a boy born in a trailer passes through foster care and the opioid crisis. Like James, it hands an old story to a sharp, funny narrator the original never fully saw. It is about poverty and addiction rather than slavery, and longer at 548 pages. Content note: drug addiction and child abuse.

Circe by Madeline Miller

For a famous story retold by the character it sidelined. Circe, the witch Odysseus meets in Homer, tells her own life, from her childhood among the gods to her exile on an island. Like James, it reclaims a figure the original treated as a supporting part. It is Greek myth rather than American history, lyrical and calmer, and its anger is about gods and men.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

For a classic that answered how European writers portrayed Africans. In pre-colonial Nigeria, Okonkwo's Igbo village is changed forever by missionaries and colonial rule. Like James, it tells a familiar history from the side of the people it happened to, and it was written partly as a reply to other books. It is short, at 209 pages, plain and tragic rather than satirical.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

For the classic that James is in conversation with, whether it means to be or not. Scout Finch tells how her father defended a Black man falsely accused in a Depression-era Alabama town. It covers race and injustice through the eyes of a white child, the kind of view James sets out to overturn. Reading the two side by side shows what changes when the story belongs to someone else.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

For the history behind the fiction. Wilkerson's narrative nonfiction follows three people among the six million Black Americans who left the Jim Crow South for northern and western cities. It begins decades after James's river journey, but it shows what slavery and its aftermath left behind. It is long, at 640 pages, and reads like a novel.