Books Like To Kill a Mockingbird

Fiction

The Color Purple

Alice Walker · 1982 · Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1983

Celie writes letters to God from rural Georgia in the early twentieth century. She has been given away, silenced, and treated as property by every man in her life. Over thirty years, through the letters and through the women who find her, she builds a self. Walker won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. It is one of the most powerful novels in American literature.

Mockingbird gives us the injustice from outside — a white child watching, an eloquent father arguing. The Color Purple gives us injustice from inside the person enduring it. Both books are about dignity surviving in a world designed to crush it, and both understand that the damage is not only legal but intimate — done inside families, inside homes, inside the silence that surrounds women and Black Americans. Read them as a pair and you see the full picture.

I read this one slowly, over a few weeks, and had to put it down more than once. It is not a comfortable read, and I don’t think it is meant to be.

Fiction

A Time to Kill

John Grisham · 1989

A ten-year-old Black girl is brutally attacked in rural Mississippi. Her father kills her attackers before the trial can begin. Now a young lawyer must defend him in a courtroom where the jury is all white and the Klan is marching outside. Grisham wrote this before The Firm, before the legal thrillers that made him famous. It is angrier and more serious than almost anything he has written since.

If To Kill a Mockingbird is the novel that asks whether justice is possible, A Time to Kill is the one that asks what happens when a man stops waiting to find out. Both are set in the American South, both put a Black man’s life at the mercy of a white legal system, and both understand that the trial is only the surface of the thing. The deeper question in both books is about what the community actually believes and what it is prepared to tolerate.

This surprised me — I went in expecting a fairly standard legal thriller and came out unsettled in a way Grisham’s later books never managed for me.

Fiction

Go Set a Watchman

Harper Lee · 2015

Scout Finch is twenty-six years old and has been living in New York. She comes home to Maycomb for a visit and finds her father at a segregationist meeting. The novel is set twenty years after Mockingbird and was, controversially, written before it. Whatever its origins, it is a serious and uncomfortable reckoning with the myth of the good white man in the South.

This is the book that makes Mockingbird harder to read — and more honest. The Atticus of Watchman is not the hero Scout believed in. Reading them together is a genuinely unsettling experience, but it is also a more truthful one. Mockingbird lets us believe that individual moral courage is enough. Watchman suggests it was never quite what we thought it was. You don’t have to admire Watchman to find it necessary.

I almost didn’t finish this one. I’m glad I did, but I’d recommend rereading Mockingbird first — it changes what this book does to you.

Non-Fiction

Just Mercy

Bryan Stevenson · 2014 · Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, 2015 · Kirkus Prize finalist, 2014

Bryan Stevenson is a lawyer who has spent his career defending people on death row — people who were wrongly convicted, or who were sentenced as children, or who had no meaningful legal representation. This is his account of that work. It is specific, detailed, and devastating. It is also, somehow, a book about hope — not optimism, but the kind of hope that requires you to keep working even when you are losing.

Atticus Finch is the fantasy version of this book. Bryan Stevenson is the real one. Just Mercy takes everything Mockingbird promises — the lawyer who fights for the man the system has already decided to destroy — and shows what that actually looks like across a career, across hundreds of cases, in a legal system that has not changed as much as we like to think. If Mockingbird made you want to believe in justice, Just Mercy will tell you what justice actually requires.

The case at the centre of it, Walter McMillian’s, was tried in Monroeville, Alabama — the town Harper Lee grew up in.

This is the book on this list I recommend most often. I’ve given it as a gift twice.

Fiction

Burial Rites

Hannah Kent · 2013 · Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, 2014 · Guardian First Book Award shortlist, 2013

Iceland, 1829. Agnes Magnúsdóttir has been condemned for the murder of her employer and is sent to live with a farming family in the north while she waits. She would be beheaded in January 1830, the last person executed in Iceland. The novel is told mostly from her perspective — who she was, what happened, what the official record left out. Kent worked from historical documents to reconstruct a life that history reduced to a verdict.

Burial Rites and To Kill a Mockingbird are both asking the same question: what happens to a person when the story told about them becomes the only story that matters? Agnes and Tom Robinson are both convicted before their trials begin. The difference is point of view — Mockingbird watches from outside; Burial Rites goes inside the condemned person and stays there. It is colder and quieter than Lee’s novel, and in some ways more precise about what institutional judgment does to a human being.

Agnes Magnúsdóttir was executed at Þrístapar on 12 January 1830; Kent worked from the surviving records of the case.

I read this on a grey week in Amsterdam and the cold Icelandic setting matched my mood a little too well. It has stayed with me longer than I expected.

Fiction

A Lesson Before Dying

Ernest J. Gaines · 1993 · National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, 1993

Rural Louisiana in the late 1940s. Jefferson, a young Black man who was present at a shooting he had nothing to do with, is sentenced to death. His godmother asks Grant Wiggins, the schoolteacher, to visit him in his cell before the execution — not to save him, which nobody believes is possible, but so that he does not die believing what the court called him.

This is the novel that takes the part of Mockingbird nobody dramatises: not the trial, but the man in the cell afterwards. Tom Robinson never speaks for himself for long. Jefferson does, and what he has to recover is not his freedom but his sense of being a person at all. It is also the book that puts the teacher, not the lawyer, at the centre of moral courage.

Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club in 1997.

Fiction

If Beale Street Could Talk

James Baldwin · 1974

Harlem in the early 1970s. Tish is nineteen and pregnant; her fiancé Fonny, a young sculptor, is in jail for a rape he did not commit, accused on the word of a police officer who wanted him gone. Both families set about trying to get him out. Tish tells the story herself — the only one of Baldwin’s novels with a woman narrating.

Tom Robinson’s case, told from the inside, in a northern city, forty years later. Baldwin is not interested in whether the reader will find the accusation convincing; he is interested in what the accusation does to two families who have to keep living while it works its way through the courts. Where Mockingbird ends at the verdict, this one shows the waiting that surrounds it.

Barry Jenkins filmed it in 2018, and Regina King won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her part in it.

Fiction

Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson · 1994 · PEN/Faulkner Award, 1995

San Piedro, a small island off the coast of Washington State, in 1954. Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese-American fisherman, is on trial for the murder of another fisherman. Ishmael Chambers, the local reporter, covers the trial, and the courtroom keeps opening onto the war, the internment camps that emptied the island of its Japanese families, and the woman Ishmael never got over.

The closest thing on this list to Mockingbird’s structure: one trial, one small town, one defendant whose neighbours have already decided what he is. Guterson swaps Alabama for a cold northern island and race hatred of Black Americans for the hatred aimed at Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor, and the mechanism turns out to be exactly the same.

It was Guterson’s first novel; he had published short stories before it.

Fiction

The Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead · 2019 · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2020 · Kirkus Prize, 2019

Tallahassee in the early 1960s. Elwood Curtis, a Black teenager who believes every word Martin Luther King says, is sent to the Nickel Academy, a reform school where boys are beaten and some of them disappear. His friend Turner believes in nothing and expects to survive. The school is based on the real Dozier School for Boys in Florida, where graves were later found.

Mockingbird is set in the 1930s and was written in 1960; this is set in the 1960s and written now, and the distance between the two is the point. Where Lee gives you a decent white lawyer to hold on to, Whitehead gives you no one. If you want to know what happened to the boys who were not lucky enough to get a trial at all, this is the book.

Whitehead is one of only four writers to have won the fiction Pulitzer twice. RaMell Ross’s film of the book was nominated for Best Picture in 2025.