Recommendations
Books Like A Mercy by Toni Morrison
For readers of the 1680s colonial American slavery novel
If you loved A Mercy — Florens's journey across 1680s colonial America, Morrison's portrait of slavery being constructed before race fully hardened into law, and the multiple voices of the colonial world — these books share the same engagement with the origins of American slavery, the same interest in the lives of the enslaved, and the same formal concentration.
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Buy on AmazonBeloved
by Toni Morrison
The essential companion — set two centuries after A Mercy, in the aftermath of the slavery that A Mercy shows being constructed; together they bracket the history of American slavery from origin to aftermath.
- 2Buy on Amazon
Kindred
by Octavia Butler
Butler's time-travel novel — a Black woman from 1976 transported back to antebellum Maryland; the companion in American fiction about the origins of race-based slavery; Butler's speculative method and Morrison's historical novel arrive at similar truths about the construction of race.
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Buy on AmazonThe Known World
by Edward P. Jones
Jones's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Black slaveholders in Virginia — the companion in American fiction about the complexity of slavery as a system; A Mercy's portrait of the pre-race-based-slavery colonial world is the companion to Jones's portrait of the way slavery corrupted everyone.
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Buy on AmazonSong of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's breakthrough novel — the companion in her fiction about African American identity and the ancestral past; the search for roots in Song of Solomon is the companion to A Mercy's portrait of the moment before those roots were severed.
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Buy on AmazonThe Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
Whitehead's Pulitzer-winning novel — the companion in contemporary African American fiction about enslaved people moving through a hostile America; where A Mercy shows slavery being constructed, The Underground Railroad shows people escaping it.
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Buy on AmazonRoots
by Alex Haley
Haley's landmark work — the companion in African American narrative about the roots of American slavery from West Africa to the antebellum South; where A Mercy is a literary novel, Roots is a narrative history; both engage with the moment of origin.
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Buy on AmazonJazz
by Toni Morrison
The companion Morrison novel — the Harlem 1926 novel and second part of her trilogy; Jazz and A Mercy together show Morrison's range across the broadest sweep of African American history.
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Buy on AmazonWashington Black
by Esi Edugyan
Edugyan's novel about a young Black slave on a Caribbean sugar plantation — the companion in contemporary literary fiction about the lives of enslaved people across the Atlantic world; where A Mercy is focused and austere, Washington Black is expansive and adventurous.
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