The Color Purple

Set in rural Georgia in the early 1900s, Alice Walker's epistolary novel opens with Celie, a poor African American girl, writing letters to God about the abuse she suffers at home. The two children she bears are taken from her. When a farmer known only as Mister seeks to wed her younger sister Nettie, Celie is handed to him instead, and he and his children mistreat her. Its sometimes explicit content, particularly its violence, has put the novel on the American Library Association list of most frequently challenged books. Its honors include a 1983 Pulitzer for fiction and the National Book Award, and it was filmed in 1985 and 2023.

It is on the read shelf of Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf.