Recommendations
Books Like Sula
Best books to read after Sula by Toni Morrison
Sula is Morrison's most compressed and formally daring novel — a study of female friendship in the Black community of the Bottom in Ohio that refuses to offer conventional moral judgment. If the novel's radical sympathy for both Sula's freedom and Nel's conventionality moved you, these books share its concern with the costs of the choices women make, its portrait of Black community life, and its conviction that moral complexity is more honest than moral judgment.
- 1Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece — the essential Morrison, and the novel that shows Sula's formal compression expanding into its fullest historical and moral expression; the ghost of Beloved haunts the same emotional territory as Sula's exploration of what women do with grief and with the impossible demands of love
- 2Buy
Song of Solomon
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's National Book Award-winning novel — the most narratively accessible of her major works and the one that most directly continues Sula's concern with Black community life in the Midwest; the Milkman's journey through his family's history is the masculine complement to Sula's portrait of women's lives in the Bottom
- 3Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's 1937 novel about Janie Crawford's search for self-expression and love is the essential companion to Sula in the tradition of fiction about Black women's interior lives — Morrison described it as the only novel by a Black woman she could recall reading in her youth, and it shares Sula's refusal to judge women who choose freedom over security
- 4Buy
The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's debut novel — Pecola Breedlove, who prays for blue eyes; the earliest and most formally experimental Morrison, and the essential companion in her early period; Pecola's destruction by white standards of beauty is the dark counterpart to Sula's insistence on defining herself by her own standards
- 5Buy
Tar Baby
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's most satirical novel — Jadine Childs and Son's conflict on a Caribbean island over the question of Black cultural identity and the costs of assimilation; the essential companion in Morrison's middle period, and the novel that most directly continues Sula's interest in what it costs a Black woman to define herself against her community
- 6Buy
Jazz
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's Harlem Renaissance novel — set in 1926 New York, narrated by the self-aware voice of the city; the companion to Beloved in Morrison's trilogy and the essential next step after Sula in understanding the full range of Morrison's formal experiments and her portrait of Black American life across time
- 7Buy
Passing
by Nella Larsen
Larsen's 1929 novella about two Black women — one of whom passes as white — is the most directly comparable predecessor to Sula in its portrait of female friendship as an intimacy that is also a competition, and its refusal to judge either woman's choice about how to live in a world that offers them limited options
- 8Buy
Quicksand
by Nella Larsen
Larsen's debut novel about Helga Crane, a biracial woman who moves between Black and white worlds searching for a place where she can be fully herself — the companion to Passing in the Harlem Renaissance tradition and the predecessor to Sula in its portrait of a woman who cannot find in any community the freedom she needs
More Sula Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.