Books To Read if You Love The Color Purple
This Christmas, Alice Walker’s classic novel comes to life for a new generation in a movie featuring an all-star cast. The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early-twentieth-century rural Georgia. It is a rich and memorable portrayal of Black women — their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. And while this book remains a powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, it isn’t the only one. Discover books like The Color Purple celebrating people who were not defined by their struggles, but in their overcoming them. For more great reads by Black voices, explore the All Ways Black book guide, then follow @AllWaysBlack on Instagram to join the conversation.
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Add to BookshelfThe Color Purple (Movie Tie-In)
by Alice Walker
Read the original inspiration for the new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove — an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others — prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Women of Brewster Place
by Gloria Naylor
The National Book Award-winning novel — and contemporary classic — that launched the brilliant career of Gloria Naylor, now with a foreword by Tayari Jones. Weaving together the stories of seven women living in Brewster Place, a bleak inner-city sanctuary, Naylor creates a powerful, moving portrait of the strengths, struggles, and hopes of Black women in America.
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$26.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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A Tale for the Time Being
by Ruth Ozeki
Full of Ozeki’s signature humor and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
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$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Nickel Boys (Winner 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
by Colson Whitehead
This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
Baldwin’s classic novel opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention in this “truly extraordinary” novel (Chicago Sun-Times).
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$16.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Vanishing Half
by Brit Bennett
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Mothers, comes a stunning novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one Black and one white. The Vanishing Half is an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is immersive and provocative, compassionate, and wise.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Woman Hollering Creek
by Sandra Cisneros
A collection of stories by Sandra Cisneros, the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. The lovingly drawn characters of these stories give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border with tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom.
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$16.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Memphis: A Read with Jenna Pick
by Tara M. Stringfellow
A spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy. Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time, Memphis paints an indelible portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country: brutality and justice, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice and love.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart is a classic narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political and religious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.
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