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James McBride was born in New York in 1957, the eighth of twelve children, and spent his first years in the Red Hook housing projects in Brooklyn. His mother was the daughter of an Orthodox rabbi from Poland who had grown up in rural Virginia, run away to Harlem, married a Black man and founded a Baptist church in her living room; by sheer force of will she saw all twelve of her children through college. McBride was an adult before he learned the truth about where she came from, and The Color of Water (1995) is the book in which he finally put her story next to his own. He is also a working saxophonist, and his novels move like a band: The Good Lord Bird (2013), which won the National Book Award, sends a boy disguised as a girl along with John Brown to Harpers Ferry; Deacon King Kong (2020) opens with an old deacon shooting a drug dealer in a Brooklyn housing project in 1969; and The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023) begins with a skeleton at the bottom of a well on Chicken Hill in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where Jewish immigrants and Black families lived side by side. Readers come to him for the crowd, for the comedy that sits right next to the grief, and for a version of American history in which people who should not have survived each other somehow did. The writers below share at least one of those things: the whole neighbourhood as protagonist, history told with jokes, or the meeting of Black and Jewish America.
By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Black American history · Community · Comedy and grief · Updated October 2026
Quick answer
If you love James McBride, start with Colson Whitehead and Percival Everett, who are just as willing to be funny about American history until it stops being possible. For the crowded neighbourhood of Deacon King Kong, read Edward P. Jones. For the Jewish grocery on Chicken Hill, Bernard Malamud's The Assistant is the direct ancestor. And for The Color of Water, Kiese Laymon wrote the other great book by a son to his mother.
10 authors like James McBride
Where to start if you loved James McBride
If you want the closest match, read Colson Whitehead.
Harlem Shuffle for the hustlers, The Underground Railroad for the history.
If you loved the crowd in Deacon King Kong, read Edward P. Jones.
Lost in the City: a whole city, one story at a time.
If you loved The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, read Bernard Malamud.
The Assistant: a Brooklyn grocery and the stranger behind the counter.
If you loved The Color of Water, read Kiese Laymon.
Heavy: a son to his mother, without the comic relief.
Frequently asked questions about authors like James McBride
Who should I read if I love James McBride?
Colson Whitehead and Percival Everett are the closest contemporaries: both write American history with comedy and horror in the same paragraph. For the crowded community of Deacon King Kong, read Edward P. Jones. For the Jewish and Black neighbours of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, read Bernard Malamud's The Assistant. For the deepest version of the same history, read Toni Morrison.
What books are like The Color of Water?
Kiese Laymon's Heavy: An American Memoir (2018) is the closest: a memoir addressed to the author's mother, about what she gave him and what she withheld. It is considerably harder going than McBride's book, which uses humour where Laymon refuses to. Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped (2013) is another Southern family memoir written with the same honesty.
What books are like The Good Lord Bird?
Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990) is the direct precedent: a comic picaresque about slavery that won the National Book Award. Percival Everett's James (2024) does to Huckleberry Finn what McBride did to John Brown, and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad (2016) bends the history of escape into something stranger.
What should I read after The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store?
Deacon King Kong (2020) is the obvious next McBride, since it works the same way: a whole community, funny and dangerous, gathered around one violent event. Outside his own work, Bernard Malamud's The Assistant (1957) is the classic novel of a struggling Jewish grocer, and Edward P. Jones's Lost in the City has the same feeling for a neighbourhood.
Is James McBride similar to Toni Morrison?
They write about overlapping history at different temperatures. Morrison goes deeper into interior consciousness and grief; McBride works outward across a crowd and lets comedy carry the weight. Readers who want Morrison's depth should start with Song of Solomon; readers who want McBride's subjects in a more elegiac register might prefer Jesmyn Ward.
Which James McBride book should I read first?
The Color of Water (1995) if you want the story behind everything else he writes. If you prefer fiction, Deacon King Kong (2020) or The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (2023) are the most accessible novels; The Good Lord Bird (2013), which won the National Book Award, is the funniest and the wildest.
Footnotes
- James McBride (writer) — Wikipedia
- The Color of Water — Reader's guide, Penguin Random House
- The Color of Water — Wikipedia
- Deacon King Kong — Wikipedia
- The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store — OverDrive
- Percival Everett — Wikipedia
- Bernard Malamud — Wikipedia
- Kiese Laymon Gives His Andrew Carnegie Medal to His Mother — ALA
List last reviewed 15 October 2026.
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