The Known World

Edward P. Jones · b. 1950 · United States

Why it matters

A formerly enslaved man becomes a slaveholder himself in antebellum Virginia, complicating every assumption about victim and perpetrator in the institution's machinery. Jones's Pulitzer winner is one of the strangest, most morally exacting novels ever written about slavery.

At a glance

A large cast and nonlinear, flash-forward structure complicate the antebellum setting.