Recommendations
Books Like Washington Black
A slave who escapes in a hot-air balloon and travels the world in search of himself
If Washington Black moved you — Wash's wonder, the Cloud-Cutter, the aquarium, the slow discovery that freedom is more complicated than escape — these eight novels share its portrait of an enslaved person's interior life, its adventure across continents, or its engagement with the long aftermath of Caribbean slavery.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Sethe haunted by the ghost of her murdered daughter — Morrison's Nobel Prize-winning novel is the most powerful literary companion to Washington Black in its insistence on the interiority of enslaved people and its refusal to let emancipation be a clean break; where Wash's freedom is complicated by what slavery has done to his psychology, Sethe's is complicated by what slavery compelled her to do
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Half-Blood Blues
by Esi Edugyan
A jazz band in wartime Paris and Berlin, and a young Black musician from Baltimore arrested by the Gestapo — Edugyan's second novel is the obvious companion to Washington Black: the same preoccupation with race, art, and the ways that history does violence to individual lives; shortlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Giller Prize, it shows the full range of Edugyan's ambition
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The Long Song
by Andrea Levy
July, a slave on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the years around Abolition, narrating her story for her son — Levy's Booker-shortlisted novel is the most direct fictional companion to Washington Black in its Caribbean slavery setting and its first-person narrator of extraordinary vitality; where Wash's comedy is a boy's wonder, July's is a woman's defiance
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Kindred
by Octavia Butler
Dana, a Black woman in 1970s California, repeatedly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation — Butler's science fiction masterpiece shares Washington Black's ambition to make the reader inhabit the experience of slavery from inside it; where Wash's escape is literal (a balloon), Dana's is temporal, but both novels use the formal properties of their genre to make slavery's damage visceral rather than historical
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The Book of Night Women
by Marlon James
Lilith, born on a Jamaican plantation in the late 1700s, and the slave women planning the rebellion that will destroy the world they know — James's second novel is the most directly comparable to Washington Black in its Caribbean plantation setting, its extraordinary narrative voice, and its portrait of enslaved people whose inner lives are as complex as those of the masters who own them; more violent and more unsparing than Edugyan's novel
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The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
Cora, a slave on a Georgia cotton plantation, escaping on a literal underground railroad that runs through an alternative-history American South — Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel shares Washington Black's use of a fantastical conceit (a hot-air balloon, a literal railroad) to take the reader through the geography of American slavery; both novels use the adventure format to make the horror of slavery accessible without diminishing it
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Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two sisters in 1750s Ghana — one who marries a British slave trader, one who is sold into slavery — and their descendants across eight generations — Gyasi's debut traces the full arc of the Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath across centuries; the multigenerational companion to Washington Black's individual story, showing the scale of what the system that owned Wash produced across generations
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Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee
Sunja, a Korean woman who becomes pregnant by a married man, and her descendants across four generations in Korea and Japan — Lee's multigenerational novel is the Pacific-Asian companion to Washington Black's Atlantic-Caribbean story: both are about the ways that colonial history and racial hierarchy determine the lives of people who are simply trying to live, and both find in family continuity a form of survival that the political systems cannot quite extinguish
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