If you liked Just Mercy, here are a few other books you might enjoy
For the last month, I’ve been talking about Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson as part of the Everyday Reading Book Club and it’s been such an amazing conversation (tomorrow is the last day of discussion!)
I can’t tell you how much I love this chance to talk about wonderful books with you guys and for all of your insightful comments and messages. I appreciate you so much!
(If you’ve new to the Everyday Reading Book Club, we read one book per month – the whole 2020 list is here – and each Wednesday, I talk about 1/4 of the month’s book on InstaStories. It’s so fun!).
If you’re interested in similar books to Just Mercy, I collected six other books that are alike in some ways.
If you liked Just Mercy, you might enjoy:
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. This book, about the prison system in the US, is next on my list after finishing Just Mercy. It has RAVE reviews.
- The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life, Freedom, and Justice by Anthony Hinton. This book is written by one of Bryan Stevenson’s clients who he saved from being wrongly executed after twenty seven years on Death Row. Many many people told me they liked this book even MORE than Just Mercy.
- The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. My book club in Texas read this many years ago and I put it off until the last moment (as I did basically every single month) and then read the whole thing in two days. It was SO fantastic about the Great Migration, where 6 million African Americans moved from the South to the North and West. between 1916 and 1970. This one follows three specific people who moved in different decades to different cities and I loved every page of it and also couldn’t BELIEVE how bad life in the South.
- Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. This is about poverty and housing, rather than poverty and prison, and I’ve been meaning to read it since it came out a few years ago (it won the Pulitzer!)
- Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City by Elijah Anderson. Several people suggested this one when I asked for recommendations for similar books to Just Mercy about inner city life and street codes.
- No Matter How Loud I Shout: A Year in the Life of Juvenile Court by Edward Humes. So many people were particularly disturbed by the chapter in Just Mercy about the number of children and youth in the prison system and this whole book is about the juvenile court system.
And if you’d like a printable copy of this list that you can take to your library or screenshot on your phone for easy access, just pop in your email address below and it’ll come right to your inbox!
Any other book recommendations to go along with Just Mercy? I’d love to hear!
