Recommendations
Books Like The Color Purple
What to read after The Color Purple
Alice Walker's The Color Purple is an epistolary novel about Celie — a Black girl in rural Georgia who survives abuse and finally finds love and her own voice. If you loved the formal power of the letters, the relationship between Celie and Shug, and the novel's sense that joy and beauty are forms of spiritual resistance, these eight books will resonate.
- 1Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford's three marriages and her sense of herself in 1930s Florida — the foundational novel that Walker credits as an influence; same rich, musical prose, same interest in a Black woman's interiority and her search for love on her own terms
- 2Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
A freed slave haunted by the daughter she killed to prevent her being taken back into slavery — the other great novel of Black women's experience in American literary fiction; more oblique than The Color Purple but examining the same questions about what women survive and what love costs them
- 3Buy
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
by Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou's memoir about her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas — the nonfiction companion to The Color Purple, covering much of the same historical period and the same experience of Black girlhood in the American South
- 4Buy
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters in 18th-century Ghana whose descendants carry the history of slavery across eight generations — same scope and the same interest in what Black women survive and what they pass on to those who come after them
- 5Buy
An American Marriage
by Tayari Jones
A professional Black couple in Atlanta destroyed by wrongful conviction — same interest in what the American criminal justice system does to Black families and the same emotional precision about love under impossible pressure
- 6Buy
The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
A Black girl in Ohio who prays for blue eyes — Morrison's debut and her most direct examination of what American beauty standards do to Black children and the families around them; the same sense of an interior world the world refuses to see
- 7Buy
Sing, Unburied, Sing
by Jesmyn Ward
A Black family in rural Mississippi on a road trip through a landscape layered with history — same lyrical approach to Black experience in the American South, the same sense of love as survival in an indifferent or hostile world
- 8Buy
The Women of Brewster Place
by Gloria Naylor
Seven Black women in an apartment building in an unnamed city — an episodic novel with the same depth of interest in Black women's interiority and the same sense of community as both constraint and salvation
More The Color Purple 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.