Congratulations on your Pulitzer, Colson Whitehead!
Whenever I make readalike lists, I always try to consider the needs of as many different kinds of readers as possible; to anticipate the variety of reasons why people may be drawn to a particular book. The intent is not to find ten “perfect” matches for any given book, but to offer stepping-stone suggestions into books with similar treatments of themes or tones—a “next book” that will enhance a reading experience, not replicate it.
The Underground Railroad would be difficult to pair with exact matches, being a combination of stark realism and alt-history allegory; an odyssey narrative in which a runaway slave named Cora escapes from a cotton plantation in Georgia, on the (literal) Underground Railroad, a journey through a brutal America which exposes her to a full and disturbing range of racial oppression at every stop. It is rich with historical detail, but provides plenty of uncomfortable food for thought in the way this history still echoes into contemporary American life.
Each of these books relates to an element of The Underground Railroad: alternate U.S. history, unconventional narrative styles, speculative/science fiction elements, or unusual approaches to themes of slavery.
A present-day version of America in which the Civil War never happened and slavery is still practiced in four states.Victor, a freed slave, has become a bounty hunter for the U.S. Marshals, infiltrating abolitionist groups and returning escaped slaves to their masters.His most recent assignment forces him to question the system he’s been enabling, to examine his forgotten past and expose the dirty secrets of America.
A tragicomic story of modern-day slavery in which desperate and poor drug addicts are lured off the streets into a van with promises of honest, well-paid employment on a farm, where housing and crack will be provided, only to find themselves virtual prisoners held in squalor, kept docile with a constant supply of drugs, and accruing debts far outstripping what they earn for their backbreaking labor.
For those who want more alt-U.S. history, try this thought-provoking and surreal trip through a changed America; one in which Elvis Presley died at birth while his twin Jesse survived, where the Twin Towers reappear in the Midwest 20 years after their fall, where a mysterious secret highway connects the coasts, where states secede, and race, music, art, and history are scrambled in a new vision of American identity.
Like Underground Railroad, this is a piece of historical speculative fiction with a focus on slavery, as a black woman repeatedly travels back in time from 1976 California to a plantation in antebellum Maryland, where she must keep saving the life of her white slaveholding great-great-grandfather in order to eventually exist, while enduring all of the horrors that black women in particular suffered during slavery.
This sprawling novel opens with the inverted fates of two sisters born in different Ghanian villages: one is sold into slavery, the other marries a white slaver. From there, the narrative surges forward across generations, tracing the sisters’ diverging bloodlines through the experience of slavery on both sides, its impact on race relations in the US, and the way cultural history lingers, affecting contemporary life.
Like Underground Railroad, this revolves around an eventful journey, but its tone is more humorous; a rollicking Huck Finn-esque adventure that imagines a young slave boy, mistaken for and disguised as a girl, who travels with John Brown, meeting significant historical personages like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass along a path that will culminate with Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry and the resulting war.
A provocative thriller in which a secret society of affluent black men use their power to right history’s wrongs by abducting descendants of slaveowners and bringing them to Forty Acres, where white slaves are subjected to the same brutal conditions their ancestors inflicted and black men hold the whip. Declining an invitation on moral grounds is a risky choice, as civil rights lawyer Martin Grey is about to discover
For a more global perspective on slavery, this book offers a stunning and brutal depiction of events on a sugar plantation set in turn of the century Jamaica, the horrible conditions of the lives of the slaves, and the rebellions these conditions eventually provoke. Beautifully written and shocking, it features a tremendously complex antiheroine in Lilith, whose grit and power exceed her fifteen years.
Of all the books on this list, this is the most straightforward. There’s no time travel or choo-choos, just an unvarnished chronicle of slavery in all its forms, as Morrison broadens the focus of her examination of Colonial America to include multiple and diverse character POVs exploring race, gender, family, and class and how instances of servitude, oppression, and freedom transcend the literal experience of slavery
The 2004 winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this is a digressive and circuitous novel centered on one of the most fascinating and perplexing aspects of slavery in American history; free black men and women who themselves owned slaves. Jones takes a real-world occurrence and spins a fictional narrative around it, including citations from fictional sources, in what is perhaps best termed “alternative scholarship.”
