Recommendations
Books Like Song of Solomon
What to read after Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977) is the novel that made Morrison a household name — Milkman Dead's journey south to find treasure and his discovery of the legend of a great-grandfather who could fly. If you were drawn to its mythological use of Black folklore, its portrait of Black family life, and Morrison's extraordinary prose, these novels offer the same depth.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winner and her most celebrated novel — Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman in post-Civil War Ohio, haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed; the next natural Morrison to read after Song of Solomon
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The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's debut — Pecola Breedlove in 1941 Ohio who wishes for blue eyes; shorter and more compressed than Song of Solomon but with the same deep attention to Black interiority and what white America does to Black children
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford's search for love in rural Florida — Morrison has said Hurston's novel was a central influence; the same celebration of Black oral tradition, the same use of vernacular as a carrier of cultural memory, the same mythological sense of the natural world
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Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
A nameless Black man makes his way from the South to New York — the other great mid-century examination of Black American identity, with the same literary ambition as Morrison and the same mythological sense of the protagonist as a figure moving through history
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Middle Passage
by Charles Johnson
A free Black man in 1830s New Orleans stows away on a ship and discovers it is a slave ship — a National Book Award winner that uses the sea voyage structure as Morrison uses the south-journey structure in Song of Solomon: a descent into the history that made Black American identity
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The Known World
by Edward P. Jones
The story of Black slave owners in antebellum Virginia — a Pulitzer Prize winner with the same ambition to inhabit a hidden chapter of African American history and the same formal sophistication Morrison brings to the same period
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Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two sisters in 18th-century Ghana and their descendants across seven generations, one in Africa, one in America — the same multigenerational structure as Song of Solomon, the same question of what ancestors carry in their bodies that passes to their children
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The Water Dancer
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A young enslaved man in antebellum Virginia who has a supernatural memory that becomes the key to his escape — magical realism applied to slavery, the same use of the mythological to access the historical that Morrison uses in Song of Solomon and Beloved
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