Recommendations
Books Like The Long Song
Slavery, emancipation, and a woman who refuses to be diminished
If The Long Song moved you — July's voice, the plantation, the comedy in the face of horror, the question of what freedom actually meant after Abolition — these eight novels share its historical depth, its portrait of Caribbean life, or its insistence on the interiority of the enslaved.
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Small Island
by Andrea Levy
Four perspectives on the Windrush generation arriving in 1948 London — Levy's Orange Prize-winning companion novel shows where July's Jamaica went next; the people in Small Island carry the history of The Long Song's plantation world with them to England, and the two novels together trace the full arc of Jamaican-British experience from slavery to the postwar moment
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter, whom she killed to prevent her return to slavery — Morrison's Nobel Prize-winning novel is the American counterpart to The Long Song: the same insistence on the interiority of enslaved people, the same engagement with what slavery did to the body and the mind, and the same refusal to represent slavery as something that ends cleanly with emancipation
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The History of Mary Prince
by Mary Prince
The first narrative of the life of a Black woman published in Britain — dictated by Mary Prince, a formerly enslaved woman from Bermuda, and published in 1831 as part of the anti-slavery campaign; the nonfiction precursor to The Long Song and the actual voice that novels like Levy's are in dialogue with; for readers who want to understand what July's narrative is reimagining
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The Colour of Lightning
by Paulette Jiles
A US Indian Agent in post-Civil War Texas trying to reclaim white captives from Kiowa raids — Jiles's novel shares The Long Song's interest in the aftermath of violence and the question of what freedom means to people who have been enslaved, though from the perspective of the American Southwest rather than the Caribbean; both novels are about what happens to people after the legal categories change
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Sugar
by Beryl Bainbridge
Set in a Lancashire sugar refinery in the nineteenth century — Bainbridge's novel shows the British end of the sugar economy that The Long Song depicts from the Jamaican end; the two novels together make the full triangular trade visible: the enslaved labor in Jamaica and the industrial labor in England both feeding the same metropolitan appetite for sweetness
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Washington Black
by Esi Edugyan
George Washington Black, an enslaved boy on a Barbados plantation who escapes in a hot-air balloon with his eccentric scientist owner — Edugyan's novel shares The Long Song's Caribbean slavery setting, its first-person narrator of extraordinary vitality, and its refusal to let the horror of slavery prevent the protagonist from being a full human being; where July's comedy is defiant, Wash's wonder is expansive
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The Luminaries
by Eleanor Catton
Twelve men and two women in the 1860s New Zealand goldfields — Catton's Booker Prize winner shares The Long Song's period setting and its formal ambition (a novel constructed around astrological structure as Levy's is constructed around July's unreliable narration); both are historical novels that use elaborate structure to show how the past conceals its own violence
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Kindred
by Octavia Butler
Dana, a Black woman in 1970s California, repeatedly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation where her enslaved ancestor lives — Butler's science fiction masterpiece is the speculative companion to The Long Song: both novels use narrative form to make the reader inhabit the experience of slavery rather than observe it from a safe historical distance; where July's comedy creates distance, Butler's time-travel conceit abolishes it
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