Suggested Further Reading: Fiction
A selection of fiction to read after Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, our 2017 Seattle Reads choice. These books are hand-picked by our librarians for your reading enjoyment.
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Kindred
Butler’s historical time time travel novel about a young black woman, Dana, who is wrenched from 1976 to the antebellum South over and over again to save the white slavemaster’s son who fathers her great-grandmother is an insightful look into the horrors of slavery and its generational impact.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Fingerprints of Previous Owners
Myrna, a maid working at a Caribbean resort, begins searching the property it inhabits that was built on a former slave plantation. Myrna’s quest to uncover the hidden secrets of the past just reveals how the trauma and pain of the past cannot stay buried forever.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
Garcia Marquez’s literary lineage of the Buendia family illustrates how our lives are not fully our own, but are the result of the tragedies and triumphs of the lives that came before us.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Middle Passage
Rutherford Calhoun, a newly freed slave from Illinois, boards a ship in New Orleans to back out of an engagement only to find that he inadvertently joined a slave ship bound for Africa. Seattle author.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Search Sweet Country
This debut set in 1975 Accra, Ghana delves into the lives of two men during a time of great societal change in their country, with Western and capitalistic values starting to eclipse the old ways.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Pachinko
In the early 1900s, Sunja falls pregnant out of wedlock and flees Korea to Japan. Her decisions will echo through four generations living in exile from a home they never knew, as each seeks to create a life for themselves.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Beloved
A young woman escapes slavery but is haunted by the ghost of her dead child in this moving Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that plumbs the depths of slavery’s traumatic and corrosive impact on individuals and society.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Barkskins
Beginning in 1693 when two brothers arrive in New France, this story follows three centuries of their descendants as they plunder the Canadian and American forests, once thought of as an infinite resource too vast to deplete.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Ghana Must Go
After their father, renowned surgeon Kweku Sai, dies outside his home in suburban Accra, the family he abandoned years ago comes together to reveal betrayals and heal wounds in a novel that Publishers Weekly called “Gorgeous. Reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri…”
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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