Fiction
Beloved
Toni Morrison
A mother and daughter reckon with the afterlife of slavery in a house haunted by a child’s return.
Reading list
Where we belong
A book club conversation about home, family, migration, and memory.
Pair The Birds of Opulence with The Warmth of Other Suns. Discuss how the two books represent the choice to stay, move, or return, and how the evidence available to fiction and history differs.
Continue the story
Recommended reading
Fiction
The Birds of Opulence
Crystal Wilkinson
Generations of women in a Kentucky community live with losses and knowledge that are carried through families.
Fiction
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
Milkman Dead follows family stories south in a novel about inheritance, naming, and flight.
History
The Warmth of Other Suns
Isabel Wilkerson
Three lives trace the distinct routes and consequences of the Great Migration.
Essays
Belonging: A Culture of Place
bell hooks
Essays on place, race, land, and return connect hooks’s Kentucky roots with a wider ethic of belonging.
Fiction
The Mothers
Brit Bennett
A Southern California church community looks back on the choices and relationships that bound three young people together.