Books like The Long Song
Andrea Levy’s The Long Song and Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace both let a historically silenced woman seize control of her story—and mischievously resist everyone who wants a simple truth from her.
If you liked The Long Song, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Long Song, and we tell you exactly what.
Grace Marks, imprisoned for murder in nineteenth-century Canada, recounts her life to a doctor convinced he can uncover what really happened. Like July, Grace understands that narration is power: she offers vivid detail, changes emphasis, notices her listener’s desires and keeps part of herself beyond his reach.
Atwood’s sly wit, documentary fragments and recurring quilt patterns make history feel simultaneously tangible and unknowable. Winner of Canada’s Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Booker, Alias Grace has become one of Atwood’s most admired novels because it turns uncertainty into a source of suspense. Anyone captivated by July’s contest with her son—and with the reader—should find Grace impossible to leave behind.
Marlon James writes plantation Jamaica with a ferocity very different from Levy’s poised comedy, yet the novels share a crucial refusal: neither will make enslaved women decorous, passive or easily admirable. Lilith is angry, proud, impulsive and startlingly alive, while the women around her form a world of rivalries, loyalties, knowledge and hard-won authority.
The creole-inflected prose has extraordinary physical force; it does not merely describe a voice reclaimed from the archive but makes that voice govern the novel. Often regarded as James’s breakthrough before his Booker-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Book of Night Women is harrowing, mordantly funny and morally uncompromising. It supplies the dangerous heat beneath The Long Song’s cool narrative smile.
The opening fact—that Henry Townsend, a formerly enslaved Black man, has himself become an enslaver—immediately unsettles every comfortable moral category. Edward P. Jones then expands outward through an entire Virginia community, moving among people with radically different amounts of power while granting each a densely particular life.
What connects it to The Long Song is its understanding that historical fiction must restore contradiction, accident and private longing, not simply illustrate a verdict already reached. Jones’s narrator moves serenely backward and forward in time, sometimes disclosing in a sentence what decades will bring; the effect is both intimate and godlike. Winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award, The Known World is one of the indispensable American novels about slavery—and one whose imaginative abundance makes the past feel permanently unfinished.