Recommendations
Books Like The Warmth of Other Suns
Best books to read after The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
The Warmth of Other Suns makes the Great Migration legible through three lives, restoring the agency and interiority of people that history usually leaves as statistics. These 8 books extend its examination of the African American experience through narrative history, memoir, and fiction.
- 1Buy
Caste
by Isabel Wilkerson
Wilkerson's 2020 book — arguing that American society is organized by a caste system, analogous to those of India and Nazi Germany, with Black Americans at the bottom — is the theoretical companion to The Warmth of Other Suns; where the first book tells the history through individual lives, the second provides the structural framework for understanding what those lives were navigating.
- 2Buy
The New Jim Crow
by Michelle Alexander
Alexander's 2010 book about mass incarceration as racialized social control is the essential structural complement to The Warmth of Other Suns: Wilkerson shows how Black Americans built their lives in northern cities over the course of the Great Migration; Alexander documents how the War on Drugs then systematically destroyed what they had built.
- 3Buy
Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates's 2015 letter to his son about being Black in America is the personal and contemporary companion to Wilkerson's historical account — where The Warmth of Other Suns documents what the Great Migration was, Between the World and Me describes what it feels like to live in the America that the migration built and that mass incarceration has been reshaping.
- 4Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Morrison's 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman haunted by the ghost of the daughter she killed to prevent her from being returned to slavery, is the foundational American novel about what chattel slavery did to the people it enslaved — the fictional counterpart to Wilkerson's account of what those people and their descendants did with the freedom they eventually won.
- 5Buy
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Gyasi's 2016 debut novel follows two half-sisters and their descendants across 250 years, from the Gold Coast of Ghana through slavery, the Great Migration, and contemporary America — a fictional companion to The Warmth of Other Suns that extends the time horizon backward to the origins of the Atlantic slave trade.
- 6Buy
Salvage the Bones
by Jesmyn Ward
Ward's National Book Award-winning 2011 novel — set in Mississippi in the days before Hurricane Katrina, following a Black family preparing for the storm — is the contemporary fiction that most directly engages with the conditions in the Deep South that the Great Migration was in part an escape from, and that remain for those who stayed or who could not leave.
- 7Buy
Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
Ellison's 1952 National Book Award-winning novel about an unnamed Black man navigating invisibility in the Harlem of the Great Migration's aftermath — the political organizations, the jazz clubs, the intellectual life, and the systematic non-recognition of Black personhood that all coexist — is the foundational American novel about what the Great Migration arrived at in the North.
- 8Buy
Just Mercy
by Bryan Stevenson
Stevenson's 2014 memoir about his work as a capital defense attorney in Alabama is the most important account of what happened to the Black southerners who did not migrate — the criminalization, incarceration, and legal destruction of a population whose Great Migration counterparts were building lives in northern cities at the same time.
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