Books To Read if You Love the Movie Sinners

Liz Rocher is coming home … reluctantly. As a Black woman, Liz doesn’t exactly have fond memories of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a predominantly white town. But her best friend is getting married, so she braces herself for a weekend of awkward, passive-aggressive reunions. Liz has grown, though; she can handle whatever awaits her. But on the night of the wedding, somewhere between dancing and dessert, the newlyweds’ daughter, Caroline, disappears—and the only thing left behind is a piece of white fabric covered in blood. As Liz starts to dig through the town’s history, she uncovers a horrifying secret about the place she once called home. Children have been going missing in these woods for years. All of them Black. All of them girls.

Fledgling, Octavia Butler’s last novel, is the story of an apparently young, amnesiac girl whose alarmingly un-human needs and abilities lead her to a startling conclusion: She is in fact a genetically modified, fifty-three-year-old vampire. Forced to discover what she can about her stolen former life, she must at the same time learn who wanted — and still wants — to destroy her and those she cares for, and how she can save herself. Fledgling is a captivating novel that tests the limits of “otherness” and questions what it means to be truly human.

In this ingenious, sweeping novel, Phillip B. Williams introduces us to an enigmatic woman named Saint, a fearsome conjurer who, in the 1830s, annihilates plantations all over Arkansas to rescue the people enslaved there. She brings those she has freed to a haven of her own creation: A town just north of St. Louis, magically concealed from outsiders, named Ours. But over time, her conjuring begins to betray her, leaving the town vulnerable to intrusions by newcomers with powers of their own. As the cracks in Saint’s creation are exposed, some begin to wonder whether the community’s safety might be yet another form of bondage.

As the daughter of a rancher in 1840s Mexico, Nena knows a thing or two about monsters — her home has long been threatened by tensions with Anglo settlers from the north. But something more sinister lurks near the ranch at night, something that drains men of their blood and leaves them for dead … Vampires, vaqueros, and star-crossed lovers face off on the Texas-Mexico border in this supernatural Western from the author of The Hacienda.

In this beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson presents a definitive and dramatic account of one of the great untold stories of American history: The Great Migration of six million Black citizens who fled the South for the North and West in search of a better life, from World War I to 1970. Wilkerson brilliantly captures their first treacherous cross-country journeys by car and train and their new lives in colonies in the New World. The Warmth of Other Suns is a bold, remarkable, and riveting work, a superb account of an “unrecognized immigration” within our own land.

Clare Kendry is living on the edge. Light-skinned, elegant, and ambitious, she is married to a racist white man unaware of her African American heritage, and has severed all ties to her past after deciding to “pass” as a white woman. Clare’s childhood friend, Irene, has chosen to remain within the African American community. Soon, Clare longs for Irene’s black identity that she abandoned and can never embrace again, and she is forced to grapple with her decision to pass for white in a way that is both tragic and telling.

By day, 17-year-old Jo Kuan works as a lady’s maid for the cruel daughter of one of the wealthiest men in Atlanta. But by night, Jo moonlights as the pseudonymous author of a newspaper advice column for the genteel Southern lady, “Dear Miss Sweetie.” When her column becomes wildly popular, she uses the power of the pen to address society’s ills, but she’s not prepared for the backlash that follows. With prose that is witty, insightful, and at times heartbreaking, Stacey Lee masterfully crafts an extraordinary social drama set in the New South.

In the fall of 1962, 27-year-old Jemma Barker is desperate to escape her life in Chicago — and the spirits she has always been able to see. When she receives an unexpected job offer from the Duchon family in New Orleans, she accepts, thinking it is her chance to start over. But Jemma discovers that the Duchon family isn’t what it seems. Light enough to pass as white, the Black family members look down on brown-skinned Jemma. Their tenuous hold on reality extends to all the members of their eccentric clan, from haughty grandmother Honorine to beautiful yet inscrutable cousin Fosette. And soon the shocking truth comes out: The Duchons are under a curse. And they think Jemma has the power to break it.

From one of this country’s most important intellectuals comes a brilliant analysis of the blues tradition that examines the careers of three crucial black women blues singers through a feminist lens. Angela Davis provides the historical, social, and political contexts with which to reinterpret the performances and lyrics of Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday as powerful articulations of an alternative consciousness profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture. A stunning, indispensable contribution to American history, as boldly insightful as the women Davis praises, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism is a triumph.

A mother and daughter with a shared talent for healing — and for the conjuring of curses — are at the heart of this dazzling first novel. Magnificently written, brilliantly researched, richly imagined, Conjure Women moves back and forth in time to tell the haunting story of Rue, Varina, and May Belle, their passions and friendships, and the lengths they will go to save themselves and those they love.

When first published in 1930, Not Without Laughter established Langston Hughes as not only a brilliant poet and leading light of the Harlem Renaissance but also a gifted novelist. In telling the story of Sandy Rogers, a young African American boy in small-town Kansas, and of his family, Hughes gives the longings and lineaments of Black life in the early twentieth century an important place in the history of racially divided America.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

“An incisive and necessary” (Roxane Gay) debut for fans of Get Out and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, about a father’s obsessive quest to protect his son — even if it means turning him white. This electrifying, hallucinatory novel is at once a keen satire of surviving racism in America and a profoundly moving family story. We Cast a Shadow fearlessly shines a light on the violence we inherit, and on the desperate things we do for the ones we love.