Recommendations
Books Like Kindred
Best books to read after Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
Octavia E. Butler's Kindred is the time travel slavery novel — Dana repeatedly pulled to antebellum Maryland. These recommendations continue the Butler canon, explore the African American speculative fiction tradition, or offer companion reading in the tradition of the novel that uses the fantastic to confront American history.
- 1Buy
Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler
The essential Butler companion — Lauren Olamina in a climate-collapsed California, Butler's most future-oriented and most political novel, showing the other side of her imagination from Kindred's historical engagement.
- 2Buy
Bloodchild and Other Stories
by Octavia E. Butler
The essential Butler short fiction — 'Bloodchild' (Hugo and Nebula winner), 'Speech Sounds,' and Butler's own essays about her work and why she writes, essential context for understanding both Kindred and her other work.
- 3Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
The canonical novel of slavery's aftermath — Sethe in Cincinnati after the Civil War, haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed to keep her from re-enslavement, Morrison's novel approaching the same subject as Kindred through a different literary tradition.
- 4Buy
The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
The Pulitzer Prize-winning reimagining of the underground railroad as a literal railroad, Whitehead using the same speculative device as Butler (making the metaphorical literal) to confront the history of American slavery.
- 5Buy
The Left Hand of Darkness
by Ursula K. Le Guin
The feminist SF companion — Le Guin's thought experiment about gender and culture, the other canonical example of using SF speculation to examine the social structures that constrain human possibility.
- 6Buy
Dawn
by Octavia E. Butler
The Xenogenesis opening — Lilith Iyapo, the lone survivor awakened on an alien ship, Butler's most formally alien novel and the beginning of her most ambitious series, for readers who want more Butler after Kindred.
- 7Buy
Roots
by Alex Haley
The family saga companion — Kunta Kinte and his descendants across seven generations from Gambia to the American Civil War, the non-fiction narrative of slavery that most directly parallels what Kindred attempts through fiction.
- 8Buy
Columbine
by Dave Cullen
The narrative non-fiction companion for understanding American violence — for readers who engaged with Kindred as a vehicle for confronting American history, Cullen's definitive account of the Columbine massacre offers the same quality of making the historical real and personal.
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