Books like 'Sula'
Readers who enjoyed Sula by Toni Morrison also liked the following books featuring the same tropes, story themes, relationship dynamics and character types.
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Pather Panchali: Song of the Road by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay
Rated: 4.56 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsPather Panchali deals with the life of the Roy family, consisting of Harihar, Sarbajaya, Apu and Durga, both in their ancestral village Nishchindipur in rural Bengal and later when they move to Varanasi in search of a better life, as well as the anguish and loss they face during their travels...Categorized as:
bildungsroman classics coming-of-age drama family historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century -
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Rated: 4.35 of 5 stars · 90 ratingsThree ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step.Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger...Categorized as:
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Recitatif by Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA beautiful, arresting short story by Toni Morrison--the only one she ever wrote--about race and the relationships that shape us through life, with an introduction by Zadie Smith. Twyla and Roberta have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in the St. Bonaventure shelter... -
The Lost Letters of Aisling: A Novel by Cynthia Ellingsen
Rated: 4.43 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsA woman faces the past she fled in a heart-stirring novel about unforgettable love and indomitable courage by the Amazon Charts bestselling author of The Lighthouse Keeper.Rainey’s grandmother makes a startling Take me home. To Ireland, the country she fled post–World War II. Though they’re inseparably close, Rainey knows few of her grandmother’s secrets... -
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The Last Leaf by O. Henry
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsSue and Johnsy are two girlfriends who live together in New York City. When Johnsy becomes sick one winter, she makes up her mind to die when the last leaf falls from the ivy plant growing outside her window. Sue would do anything to help her friend get well, but she is a poor artist. As the winter wind blows and the rain falls, there seems no way to stop the last leaf from falling...Categorized as:
classics drama friendship historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic university 20th-century -
A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsFirst published in 1956, this much sought-after autobiographical recollection of Truman Capote's rural Alabama boyhood has become a modern-day classic. We are proud to be reprinting this warm and delicately illustrated edition of A Christmas Memory--"a tiny gem of a holiday story" (School Library Journal, starred review)...Categorized as:
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Body and Soul by Frank Conroy
Rated: 4.31 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn the dim light of a basement apartment, six-year-old Claude Rawlings sits at an old white piano, picking out the sounds he has heard on the radio and shutting out the reality of his lonely world.The setting is 1940s New York, a city that is "long gone, replaced by another city of the same name...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age drama family historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic 20th-century -
The Secret Diary by Anna Stuart
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsTwo women. One house. And a secret that spans decades…The past merges with the present in an unforgettable, poignant story of love, loss and courage in this beautifully written story set between World War Two and the present day.She steps into the room and it’s like going back in time.Catapulting her right into the heart of the 1940s.The spindle of the record player frozen and ready to play...Categorized as:
family female-mc friendship historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult book -
A River Runs Through it and Other Stories by Norman Maclean, Annie Proulx
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsJust as Norman Maclean writes at the end of "A River Runs through It" that he is "haunted by waters," so have readers been haunted by his novella. A retired English professor who began writing fiction at the age of 70, Maclean produced what is now recognized as one of the classic American stories of the twentieth century...Categorized as:
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Tumbling by Diane McKinney-Whetstone
Rated: 4.25 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsDiane McKinney-Whetstone's lyrical first novel, Tumbling, vividly captures a tightly knit African-American neighborhood in South Philadelphia during the forties and fifties. Its central characters, Herbie and Noon, are a loving but unconventional couple whose marriage remains unconsummated for many years as Noon struggles to repossess her sexuality after a brutal attack in her past...Categorized as:
classics drama family female-mc historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century -
The Citadel by A.J. Cronin
Rated: 4.22 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe Citadel follows the life of Andrew Manson, a young and idealistic Scottish doctor, as he navigates the challenges of practicing medicine across interwar Wales and England. Based on A.J. Cronin’s own experiences as a physician, this book boldly confronts traditional medical ethics, and has been noted as one of the inspirations for the formation of the National Health Service...Categorized as:
classics drama high-school historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic 20th-century adult -
In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 35 ratingsSet during the waning days of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic in 1960, this extraordinary novel tells the story of the Mirabal sisters, three young wives and mothers who are assassinated after visiting their jailed husbands...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age drama family female-mc high-school historical-fiction literary-fiction -
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsBuddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, has become a classic of modern literature.It is the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany facing the advent of modernity; in an uncertain new world, the family’s bonds and traditions begin to disintegrate...Categorized as:
bildungsroman classics drama family historical-fiction literary-fiction university 20th-century -
Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThe women of Brewster Place are "hard-edged, soft-centered, brutally demanding, and easily pleased". In their stories, Gloria Naylor has created a community of women that has touched thousands of readers across the country. Now the basis for a November 1988, ABC-TV, three-hour movie, starring Oprah Winfrey... -
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The Traveller's Daughter by Michelle Vernal
Rated: 4.30 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsROSA’S PAST IS HER PANDORA’S BOX, AND THE LID IS ABOUT TO BE LIFTED … ‘If you lie down with dogs you’ll rise with fleas’ – Irish Proverb Rosa Sorenson’s conversation was often peppered with sayings from her homeland. It was these conversational clangers that gave her daughter Kitty the only clue as to a childhood her mother refused to speak of...Categorized as:
family female-mc historical-fiction literary-fiction 20th-century adult book fiction -
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsMarcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English...Categorized as:
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The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway by Ernest Hemingway, John Hemingway
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 29 ratingsTHE ONLY COMPLETE COLLECTION BY THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR In this definitive collection of Ernest Hemingway's short stories, readers will delight in the author's most beloved classics such as "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," "Hills Like White Elephants," and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and will discover seven new tales published for the first time in this collection...Categorized as:
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The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 44 ratingsThe Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America...Categorized as:
bildungsroman classics coming-of-age drama family female-mc high-school historical-fiction -
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 32 ratingsMarcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time is one of the most entertaining reading experiences in any language and arguably the finest novel of the twentieth century. But since its original prewar translation there has been no completely new version in English...Categorized as:
bildungsroman classics coming-of-age drama family historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction -
The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2: The Romantic Period through the Twentieth Century by M.H. Abrams, Stephen Greenblatt
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsFirmly grounded by the hallmark strengths of all Norton Anthologies--thorough and helpful introductory matter, judicious annotation, complete texts wherever possible--The Norton Anthology of English Literature has been revitalized in this Eighth Edition through the collaboration between six new editors and six seasoned ones...Categorized as:
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Not Without Laughter by Langston Hughes
Rated: 4.19 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsIn a poor town in Kansas, an African American family struggles. At its centre sits Sandy Rodgers - a young boy attempting to find purpose amid the chaos, meagreness and music of his surroundings...Categorized as:
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Emily Climbs by L.M. Montgomery, Jane Urquhart
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 27 ratingsEmily Starr was born with the desire to write. As an orphan living on New Moon Farm, writing helped her face the difficult, lonely times. But now all her friends are going away to high school in nearby Shrewsbury, and her old-fashioned, tyrannical aunt Elizabeth will only let her go if she promises to stop writing! All the same, this is the first step in Emily's climb to success... -
The Diviners by Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe Diviners is the culmination and completion of Margaret Laurence's Manawaka cycle.This is the powerful story of an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town is a toughening process – putting distance between herself and a world that wanted no part of her...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age drama female-mc historical-fiction literary-fiction realistic university -
A Sky Painted Gold by Laura Wood
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsThe Great Gatsby meets I Capture the Castle in this gorgeously dreamy coming-of-age romance perfect for fans of A Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue.It is the summer of 1929. Lou Trevelyan is a small-town girl with big dreams of becoming a writer. Then she meets the Cardew siblings: the bubbly Caitlin and her handsome, enigmatic brother, Robert...Categorized as:
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The Major Plays by Anton Chekhov, Rosamund Bartlett
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsAnton ChekhovThe Major PlaysIvanov * The Sea Gull * Uncle Vanya * The Three Sisters * The Cherry Orchard“Let the things that happen onstage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life,” Chekhov once declared. “For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time, their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up...Categorized as:
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Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery
Rated: 4.15 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsJane and her mother live in a gloomy old mansion, where their lives are ruled by her ovebearing grandmother. For most of her life Jane has believed that her father is dead. Then, one dull April morning, a letter comes. Not only is her father alive and well, but he wants Jane to spend the summer with him on Prince Edward Island...Categorized as:
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Where the Rivers Merge by Mary Alice Monroe
Rated: 4.38 of 5 stars · 16 ratings"This is book club fiction at its finest!" —Lisa Wingate, #1 New York Times bestselling author From New York Times bestselling author Mary Alice Monroe comes her highly anticipated Where the Rivers Merge, the first of two epic and triumphant novels celebrating one intrepid woman's life across multiple generations in the American South...Categorized as:
historical-fiction coming-of-age family friendship literary-fiction season-summer female-mc fiction -
Finding Dorothy by Elizabeth Letts
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsA richly imagined novel that tells the story behind The Wonderful Wizard of Oz , the book that inspired the iconic film, through the eyes of author L. Frank Baum's intrepid wife, Maud--from the family's hardscrabble days in South Dakota to the Hollywood film set where she first meets Judy Garland...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age drama family female-mc friendship historical-fiction literary-fiction -
The Samurai's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsA 20-year-old Chinese painter named Stephen is sent to his family's summer home in a Japanese coastal village to recover from a bout with tuberculosis. Here he is cared for by Matsu, a reticent housekeeper and a master gardener. Over the course of a remarkable year, Stephen learns Matsu's secret and gains not only physical strength, but also profound spiritual insight...Categorized as:
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The Waves (Annotated) by Virginia Woolf, Molly Hite
Rated: 4.11 of 5 stars · 28 ratingsThe Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, standing with those few works of twentieth-century literature that have created unique forms of their own. In deeply poetic prose, Woolf traces the lives of six children from infancy to death who fleetingly unite around the unseen figure of a seventh child, Percival...Categorized as:
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Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Rated: 4.12 of 5 stars · 66 ratingsIn this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction...Categorized as:
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Liverpool Lou by Lyn Andrews
Rated: 4.33 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsOne of Lyn Andrews' first eight novels, transferring from the original publisher to Headline; already steady sellers, they will be targeted for a huge increase in sales. Aunt Babsey considered herself a cut above her neighbours on Everton Ridge. For one thing she was 'trade'. She taught her children to be respectable, and she ruled her family with a rod of iron...Categorized as:
coming-of-age family female-mc friendship historical-fiction 20th-century adult audiobook -
The Lost Sister of Fifth Avenue by Ella Carey
Rated: 4.20 of 5 stars · 10 ratingsNew York, 1938: Martha pulled the door of her Fifth Avenue apartment closed, her heart thumping, re-reading the telegram she’d been dreading. Her beloved sister Charlotte needed her help. She was alone in Paris, and the threat of Nazi invasion grew ever stronger. The time had come for Martha to make the bravest decision of her life. She needed to bring Charlotte home...Categorized as:
historical-fiction family female-mc friendship literary-fiction ww2 urban historical -
Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether, Nellie Y. McKay
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsThis modern classic is “a tough, tender, bitter novel of a black girl struggling towards womanhood” in 1930s Harlem—with a foreword by James Baldwin ( Publishers Weekly ). Depression-era Harlem is home for twelve-year-old Francie Coffin and her family, and it’s both a place of refuge and the source of untold dangers for her and her poor, working class family... -
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The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy
Rated: 4.14 of 5 stars · 14 ratingsIt is the early 1970s. Twelve-year-old Joan is sure that she is going to be miserable when her family moves from Connecticut to California. Then she meets a most unusual girl. Sarah prefers to be called "Fox" and lives with her author dad in a rundown house in the middle of the woods... -
Explosion in a Cathedral by Alejo Carpentier
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsThis fine, somber novel, by the author of the widely acclaimed The Lost Steps, deals with the French Revolution, chiefly in the Caribbean...Categorized as:
bildungsroman classics historical-fiction literary-fiction magical-realism 20th-century adult book -
A World for Julius by Alfredo Bryce Echenique
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsJulius was born in a mansion on Salaverry Avenue, directly across from the old San Felipe Hippodrome. Life-size Disney characters and cowboy movie heroes romp across the walls of his nursery. Out in the carriage house, his great-grandfather’s ornate, moldering carriage takes him on imaginary adventures...Categorized as:
classics coming-of-age drama historical-fiction literary-fiction poc-mc 20th-century adult -
The Essential Plays by Anton Chekhov
Rated: 4.13 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsBecause Chekhov’s plays convey the universally recognizable, sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic, frustrations of decent people trying to make sense of their lives, they remain as fresh and vigorous as when they were written a century ago... -
Maurice by E.M. Forster
Rated: 4.07 of 5 stars · 30 ratingsMaurice is heartbroken over unrequited love, which opened his heart and mind to his own sexual identity. In order to be true to himself, he goes against the grain of society’s often unspoken rules of class, wealth, and politics.Forster understood that his homage to same-sex love, if published when he completed it in 1914, would probably end his career...Categorized as:
bildungsroman classics coming-of-age drama historical-fiction lgbtq literary-fiction realistic -
Lime Street Blues by Maureen Lee
Rated: 4.17 of 5 stars · 6 ratingsIn the 1960s Liverpool, and the glamorous world of music, is the place to be...Categorized as:
coming-of-age family female-mc friendship historical-fiction 20th-century adult book -
Green Days by the River by Michael Anthony
Rated: 4.08 of 5 stars · 12 ratingsA novel about a boy on the edge of adult responsibilities, this is the story of Shell - a Trinidadian boy wtho moves to a new village and meets two girls...Categorized as:
literary-fiction coming-of-age high-school classics bildungsroman fiction young-adult poc-author -
Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall, Mary Helen Washington
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 16 ratingsA vivid and bittersweet classic coming-of-age tale, set in immigrant Brooklyn. Remarkable for its courage, its color, and its natural control. --The New Yorker An unforgettable novel written with pride and anger, with rebellion and tears...Categorized as:
bildungsroman classics coming-of-age drama family friendship historical-fiction literary-fiction -
Caucasia by Danzy Senna
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsIn Caucasia—Danzy Senna's extraordinary debut novel and national bestseller—Birdie and Cole are the daughters of a black father and a white mother, intellectuals and activists in the Civil Rights Movement in 1970s Boston...Categorized as:
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Whisper of the Moon Moth by Lindsay Jayne Ashford
Rated: 4.06 of 5 stars · 18 ratingsFrom the author of The Color of Secrets and The Woman on the Orient Express comes a poignant novel inspired by the Hollywood legend—and the secrets of—actress Merle Oberon, famous for playing Cathy to Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff in the film Wuthering Heights. For nineteen-year-old Estelle Thompson, going to the cinema is more than a way to pass the time…it’s a way out...Categorized as:
historical-fiction coming-of-age female-mc poc-mc realistic literary-fiction romance historical -
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The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed
Rated: 4.05 of 5 stars · 20 ratingsAshley Bennett and her friends are living the charmed life. It’s the end of senior year and they’re spending more time at the beach than in the classroom. They can already feel the sunny days and endless possibilities of summer. Everything changes one afternoon in April, when four LAPD officers are acquitted after beating a black man named Rodney King half to death...Categorized as:
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Reunion by Fred Uhlman
Rated: 4.04 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsA daring novella about the loss of innocence in pre-war Germany.Reunion is the story of intense and innocent devotion between two young men growing up in "the soft, serene, bluish hills of Swabia," and the sinister (but all too mundane) forces that end both their friendship and their childhood.The year is 1932... -
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Rated: 4.02 of 5 stars · 33 ratingsGo Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic...Categorized as:
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The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck, Susan Shillinglaw
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 31 ratingsEthan Allen Hawley, the protagonist of Steinbeck’s last novel, works as a clerk in a grocery store that his family once owned. With Ethan no longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide...Categorized as:
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Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 26 ratingsThe first book in Louise Erdrich's highly acclaimed "Native American" trilogy that includes "The Beet Queen," "Tracks," and "The Bingo Palace," re-sequenced and expanded to include never-before-published chapters.Set on and around a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation, Love Medicine is the epic story about the intertwined fates of two families: the Kashpaws and the Lamartines... -
The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry
Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars · 24 ratingsThis is one of McMurtry's most memorable novels - the basis for the film of the same name. Set in a small, dusty Texas town, it introduces Jacy, Duane and Sonny, teenagers stumbling towards adulthood, discovering the beguiling mysteries of sex and the even more baffling mysteries of love...
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