Books like The Color Purple
What should you read after Alice Walker’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Alice Walker
- 1982
- Literary fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after The Color Purple
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchBeloved
Toni Morrison
Morrison is the other pole of the same tradition: a woman carrying what was done to her, a household of women, and a past that will not stay in the past. Harder going, and essential.
- Surviving abuse and naming it
- A woman finding her own voice
- An ending that grants repair
- Fractured, demanding structure
Best for the voiceTheir Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
The book Walker rescued from obscurity and named as her ancestor. Janie tells her own life in her own speech, and the arc — three marriages, one self recovered — is the same arc.
- Black vernacular on the page
- A woman finding her own voice
- The rural South between the wars
- Dialect takes adjusting to
Great matchThe Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
Morrison's first novel, and the one closest to Celie's opening pages: a girl assaulted by her father, and a community that decides not to look. It offers no repair at all.
- Surviving abuse and naming it
- A woman finding her own voice
- An ending that grants repair
- Devastating with no relief
Best for the true versionI Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
Angelou lived a great deal of what Walker imagined — the rural South, the assault, the years of silence, the slow return of speech — and wrote it down as memoir.
- A woman finding her own voice
- Surviving abuse and naming it
- The rural South between the wars
- Memoir, not fiction
Worth a look — with a warningThe Help
Kathryn Stockett
Popular, propulsive, and set among Black women in the segregated South — but written by a white novelist through a white protagonist, and criticised hard for exactly that.
- The rural South between the wars
- A woman finding her own voice
- Black vernacular on the page
- White saviour framing, widely faulted
Great matchThe Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
A household of Black sisters who take in a damaged white girl, in the same South and the same decade. Much softer than Walker, and honest about what it is doing.
- An ending that grants repair
- The rural South between the wars
- Women who love women
- Sentimental in places
Best for the history underneathKindred
Octavia Butler
A modern Black woman keeps being pulled back to a Maryland plantation to keep her own ancestor alive. Butler makes the inheritance Celie is living inside brutally literal.
- Surviving abuse and naming it
- A woman finding her own voice
- The rural South between the wars
- Built on a time-travel premise
Worth a look — with a warningThe Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood
Here for the private testimony of a woman whose body is somebody else's property, told in a voice she has to hide. The mechanism is Walker's; the world is invented.
- Surviving abuse and naming it
- Letters written to God
- Women who love women
- Speculative future, not history
Best for the two sisters apartHomegoing
Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana, one sold and one married, and three hundred years of their descendants. The Celie-and-Nettie split, opened out across continents.
- Sisters separated for decades
- Surviving abuse and naming it
- An ending that grants repair
- Fourteen protagonists, one chapter each
Great matchAmericanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie's heroine writes her way into a self, in her own idiom, across Nigeria and America — the same argument Walker makes about who is permitted to describe their own life.
- A woman finding her own voice
- An ending that grants repair
- Letters written to God
- Contemporary and cosmopolitan
Great matchThe Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan
Mothers and daughters telling each other the things they could never say aloud, with the older generation's stories arriving like Nettie's letters — late, and changing everything.
- Sisters separated for decades
- A woman finding her own voice
- An ending that grants repair
- Chinese-American, not Black Southern
Great matchHalf of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Two sisters, a war, and years of not knowing whether the other is alive. Adichie shares Walker's willingness to write atrocity and then insist on the reunion anyway.
- Sisters separated for decades
- Surviving abuse and naming it
- An ending that grants repair
- Nigeria in the 1960s
Best for one woman's whole life toldThe Book of Negroes
Lawrence Hill
Aminata narrates sixty years from abduction in West Africa to abolitionist London, and the book's whole argument — like Walker's — is that she gets to tell it herself.
- A woman finding her own voice
- Surviving abuse and naming it
- Letters written to God
- Eighteenth-century historical epic
What should you read after The Color Purple?
The Color Purple by Alice Walker works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is Beloved by Toni Morrison — morrison is the other pole of the same tradition: a woman carrying what was done to her, a household of women, and a past that will not stay in the past. Harder going, and essential.
If what stayed with you was black vernacular on the page, read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston instead: the book Walker rescued from obscurity and named as her ancestor. Janie tells her own life in her own speech, and the arc — three marriages, one self recovered — is the same arc. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is the other strong option — morrison's first novel, and the one closest to Celie's opening pages: a girl assaulted by her father, and a community that decides not to look. It offers no repair at all.
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