Seattle Reads: Read Deeper
If you're enjoying the 2024 Seattle Reads book "Parable of the Sower" and want to read authors inspired by or who inspired Octavia Butler, check out these titles! Annotations from NoveList, unless otherwise attributed. (created April 2024)
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Parable of the Sower
In 202[4] California, an eighteen-year-old African American woman, suffering from a hereditary trait that causes her to feel others' pain as well as her own, flees northward from her small community and its desperate savages.
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Grievers
Dune’s mother is patient zero of a mysterious illness that stops people in their tracks—in mid-sentence, mid-action, mid-life—casting them into a nonresponsive state from which no one recovers. As the quarantined city slowly empties of life, she investigates what caused the plague, and what might end it, following in the footsteps of her late researcher father, who has a physical model of Detroit’s history and losses set up in their basement. She dusts it off and begins tracking the sick and dying, discovering patterns, finding comrades in curiosity, conspiracies for the fertile ground of the city, and the unexpected magic that emerges when the debt of grief is cleared.
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Dhalgren
Journeying to the central United States city of Bellona, where all have fled save madmen and criminals, a poet and adventurer known only as the Kid wonders at the strange portents that appear in the city's cloud-covered sky.
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The Book of the Unnamed Midwife
Elison's gripping and grim first novel... tells the story of an unnamed woman who survives a plague that wipes out most of humankind in just weeks, leaving 10 male survivors for every woman. Years after the initial wave of the terrible disease, all pregnancies still end in the death of the baby, and most also kill the mother. (Publishers Weekly)
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Future Home of the Living God
A tale set in a world of reversing evolution and a growing police state follows pregnant twenty-six-year-old Cedar Hawk Songmaker, who investigates her biological family while awaiting the birth of a child who may emerge as a member of a primitive human species.
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Brown Girl in the Ring
When the rich and privileged leave the city behind, barricaded behind roadblocks, the people of the inner city must adopt the old ways of farming, barter, and herb lore, but when the monied need a harvest of bodies, one girl bargains with the gods and gives birth to new legends.
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The Liminal People
When his ex asks for help, Taggert risks the wrath of his enigmatic master to try and save her daughter. But as Taggert realizes the girl has more power than even he can imagine, he has to delve into the very nature of own skills and utilize his heart and soul to survive.
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The City We Became
Takes readers into the dark underbelly of New York City where a roiling, ancient evil stirs in the halls of power, threatening to destroy the city and her six newborn avatars.
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Sea Change
Activist lawyer Renata Black—covert member of the Org—must go deep underground to unravel the truth behind the ecological disaster that has paralyzed the food industry and destroyed her family.
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Everything for Everyone
By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse. (Amazon description)
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