The American story, retold

Colson Whitehead

A runaway slave flees north on a literal underground railroad, state by nightmarish state.

Yaa Gyasi

Two half-sisters in Ghana, one married to a slaver, one sold into slavery — and eight generations of their split fates.

Brit Bennett

Twin sisters run from their Black hometown; one comes back, the other passes as white and disappears.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

In Puritan Boston, a woman branded with a scarlet A guards the identity of her child's father.

Isabel Wilkerson

Six million Black Americans fled the South in the twentieth century — told through three unforgettable lives.

Toni Morrison

The ghost story America had to write.

Ralph Ellison

A man no one will actually see.

Alice Walker

A Black woman finding her own worth.

Isabel Wilkerson

The hidden hierarchy beneath American life.

John Steinbeck

Two migrant workers chase the dream of a little farm of their own, and one of them is a gentle giant who doesn't know his own strength.

Zora Neale Hurston

A Black woman in the rural South tells the story of her three marriages and her long search for a life, and a love, of her own.

Kathryn Stockett

In 1960s Mississippi, a young white woman and two Black maids risk everything to tell the truth about the homes they serve.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

A communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army flees to America, still secretly reporting on the exiles around him.

Erik Larson

The dazzling 1893 Chicago World's Fair and, in its shadow, a charming serial killer luring victims to a custom-built 'murder castle.'

Michelle Alexander

Mass incarceration, this landmark argues, is not a broken system but a redesigned racial caste, hiding in plain sight.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

Lincoln beat his rivals for the presidency, then made them his cabinet, and out-led them all through the Civil War.