Recommendations
Books Like The Underground Railroad
What to read after The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
If The Underground Railroad's speculative reframing of American slavery history stayed with you — both its genre innovation and its unflinching commitment to the experience of enslaved people — these books push further into the same territory from different directions.
- 1Buy
Kindred
by Octavia Butler
A contemporary Black woman is pulled back to the antebellum South, where she must protect her enslaver ancestor to ensure her own existence. Butler invented the template Whitehead built on — a speculative mechanism that makes the past impossible to observe from a safe distance.
- 2Buy
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman in 1873 Ohio, lives with the ghost of the daughter she killed rather than let be taken back into slavery. Morrison's novel is the psychological interior of what Whitehead renders as alternate history — together they complete a picture.
- 3Buy
The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead
Whitehead's follow-up novel follows two Black teenagers at a brutal reform school in Jim Crow Florida in the 1960s. More restrained and formally precise than The Underground Railroad, and devastating in a different way.
- 4Buy
Zone One
by Colson Whitehead
Whitehead's zombie novel — a soldier helps clear Manhattan of stragglers after civilization collapses — is a literary zombie novel in the way The Underground Railroad is a literary alternate history: it uses genre conventions as a vehicle for something stranger and more interior.
- 5Buy
Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters in 18th-century Ghana begin a family history Gyasi traces through eight generations across two continents, from the slave trade to contemporary America. A novel that makes the full Atlantic scope of American slavery felt.
- 6Buy
Roots
by Alex Haley
Haley's 1976 novel about Kunta Kinte, captured in Gambia and sold into American slavery, and his descendants across seven generations, is the direct ancestor of every novel about slavery as a family epic. Required context.
- 7Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford's story of her three marriages and search for selfhood in early-20th-century Black Florida — written in 1937, it is the missing link between the slave narrative tradition and the contemporary novel of Black interiority.
- 8Buy
The Water Dancer
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A young enslaved man with a mysterious ability to move objects with water escapes a Virginia plantation and joins the underground railroad in Coates's debut novel. The most direct fictional descendant of both Butler's Kindred and Whitehead's Underground Railroad.
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