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Books Like Salvage the Bones
Best books to read after Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
If Salvage the Bones moved you — the Batiste family's twelve days before Katrina, Esch's pregnancy and her Greek myths, the way the novel holds poverty and love and catastrophe in the same breath — these eight novels share its portrait of poor families under pressure, its Southern or rural setting, or its engagement with race and survival in contemporary America.
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Buy on AmazonSing, Unburied, Sing
by Jesmyn Ward
Jojo traveling to Parchman Farm prison to collect his father — Ward's second National Book Award winner is the immediate companion to Salvage the Bones: the same rural Mississippi setting, the same portrait of a Black family under extreme pressure, the same engagement with racial violence and its aftermath; where Salvage the Bones is organized around the approach of a storm, Sing, Unburied, Sing is organized around a road trip and a ghost
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Buy on AmazonTheir Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford finding love and identity in a Black Florida community — Hurston's 1937 novel is the literary ancestor that Salvage the Bones most clearly descends from: the same rural Black community seen from inside, the same engagement with a woman's interior life and desire in a setting that has been defined from outside as purely about poverty and limitation, and the same devastating hurricane at the climax
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Buy on AmazonBeloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe and her haunted house in post-Civil War Ohio — Morrison's masterpiece shares Salvage the Bones's preoccupation with the ways that historical violence continues to inhabit the bodies and houses of the people it touched; where Ward's storm is the present catastrophe that reveals existing damage, Morrison's ghost is the past catastrophe that cannot be laid to rest; both novels center on a mother's relationship to her children under impossible conditions
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Buy on AmazonWhere the Crawdads Sing
by Delia Owens
Kya Clark, abandoned as a child in the North Carolina marshes, raising herself and becoming a naturalist — Owens's bestseller shares Salvage the Bones's portrait of a girl surviving in a poor coastal Southern community largely without adult protection; both novels are deeply attentive to the natural world as both beauty and threat, and both center on a young woman whose intelligence and capacity for love are at odds with her social circumstances
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Buy on AmazonThe Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
Cora escaping slavery through an underground railroad that is literally a railroad in an alternate history — Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize winner shares Salvage the Bones's engagement with American racial violence and its investment in a young Black woman's survival and interiority; where Ward's Esch is surviving the present catastrophe of Katrina and poverty, Whitehead's Cora is surviving the historical catastrophe of slavery
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Buy on AmazonBastard Out of Carolina
by Dorothy Allison
Bone Boatwright growing up poor and white in Greenville, South Carolina, in a family destroyed by poverty and her stepfather's violence — Allison's autobiographical novel is the closest in setting and social situation to Salvage the Bones: the same rural Southern poverty, the same large family holding together through love and barely, the same girl narrator trying to understand a world that has not been built for her survival
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Buy on AmazonA Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry
The Younger family in 1950s Chicago and the $10,000 life insurance check that tests what each member wants from life — Hansberry's landmark play shares Salvage the Bones's concern with what poor Black families dream of and what those dreams cost; where Ward's family faces the destruction of Katrina, Hansberry's family faces the destruction of white resistance to Black upward mobility; both works are about the gap between what a family deserves and what it is allowed to have
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Buy on AmazonThe Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead
Elwood Curtis sent to the Nickel Academy reform school in Jim Crow Florida — Whitehead's second Pulitzer Prize winner shares Salvage the Bones's portrait of young Black people whose potential is systematically blocked by a society that has decided in advance what their lives are worth; where Ward's Batiste family faces the indifferent catastrophe of Katrina, Whitehead's Elwood faces the deliberate catastrophe of institutional racism
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