Genre
Best Indigenous American Novels
Contemporary Indigenous American literary fiction has been doing some of the strongest work in American letters for a decade. Urban Indigenous ensemble novels, literary-horror, the slow rewriting of the European-folkloric conventions that have dominated the broader literary representation. These three are our most essential picks, with two adjacent novels by writers in conscious dialogue with the same project.
5 books on this list.
There Thereby Tommy Orange
5.0“There There by Tommy Orange 2018 review. Twelve Native American characters converge on the Big Oakland Powwow. PEN/Hemingway Award 2019 and the canonical contemporary urban Indigenous American literary novel.”
The Only Good Indiansby Stephen Graham Jones
5.0“The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones 2020 review. Four Blackfeet men who committed a hunting transgression are tracked across the present-day American West by something that wants the moral debt paid. Bram Stoker Award 2020.”
Jamesby Percival Everett
5.0“James by Percival Everett 2024 review. A retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the enslaved man Jim, in his own voice. The most important American novel of 2024 and the right Everett entry point.”
Belovedby Toni Morrison
5.0“Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 review. Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988 and one of the canonical American novels of the late twentieth century.”
Demon Copperheadby Barbara Kingsolver
5.0“Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 2022 review. A Dickensian retelling of David Copperfield in the opioid-crisis Appalachia of the 1990s and 2000s. Pulitzer Prize and Women's Prize 2023 and Kingsolver's defining late-career novel.”