This is the story of two sisters-one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South-who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence. 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.Īt lunch in a restaurant on the East Side, Cato Douglas, a Black novelist, learns that Paul Cummings, a white Jewish novelist and a friend for thirty years, has just committed suicide.ġ983 National Book Award, 1983 Pulitzer Prize Three orphans in 1970s Africa escape their orphanage to the busy port town of Pointe-Noire where they form a gang of petty thieves and become part of the underworld.Ģ015 Booker Prize, 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, 2015 American Book AwardĪ novel framed as a fictional oral history that explores the events and characters surrounding the attempted assassination of Bob Marley during the political turmoil on Jamaica in the late 1970sġ999 Locus Award for Best First Novel, 1999 John W. Sethe, an escaped slave living in post-Civil War Ohio with her daughter and mother-in-law, is persistently haunted by the ghost of her dead baby girl.Ģ018 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Fiction Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 Rydra Wong, a poet and code expert, must break an enemy government's code, but discovers that the code is really a supersophisticated language.Ģ011 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Fictionįearless, funny, and ultimately tender, Evans's stories offer a bold new perspective on the experience of being young and African-American or mixed-race in modern-day America.ġ988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1988 American Book Award Separated by differing ambitions after falling in love in occupied Nigeria, beautiful Ifemelu experiences triumph and defeat in America, while Obinze endures an undocumented status in London until the pair is reunited in their homeland fifteen years later. If your favorite isn’t included in this list, please include it in the comments! Descriptions in italics provided by the publishers.Ģ013 National Book Critics Circle Award, 2014 Women’s Prize Finalist

50 greatest american novels