The Known World

The depth of description and feeling in this book reminded me of Cold Moutain. Yet I found this even more riveting. The author includes a list and description of the characters, should the reader forget a relationship.

This book was so authentic emotionally and in its level of detail and realism that it was hard to accept it as fiction!

Historically, the book is a great review of a difficult period in American history. The narrative is difficult to follow because the timeline is all over the place.

Agony. Pain. Misery. Torture. You will experience all of the above trying to follow this book. Exercise your freedom. Run away from this novel. I really was excited to read this one, but could not follow the endless list of characters and their families. If you like reading phone books, you will love this.

Manchester County, Virginia doesn't exist. Never has. After reading The Known World, however, you'd be forgiven if you thought you could take a tour of it's plantations and slave cemetaries on your vacation to colonial Williamsburg. The complicated pre-civil war Southern society that Edward P. Jones......more

there is that old adage that a good book will tell you how to read it. and i have no idea to whom that should be attributed, only that my undergrad professors seemed to have been born to quote that thought endlessly: in my gothic lit class, my enlightenment class, my victorian lit class... the afric......more

I know this is a critically acclaimed book, a Pulitzer winner, and a book tackling a difficult and complex stain on America history: slavery and black slave owners. There are moments when the book does say some interesting things or reveal some unsavory and uncomfortable truths, but it was so hard t......more

Ambitious, Interesting, Disorganized In an interview, Edward P. Jones revealed that The Known World took shape around 1) when he heard that Black people had owned slaves and 2) when he read a thin paperback in high school about a Jewish man who decided to join the Nazi party, how he acted in oppositi......more

This is a complex novel, with dense writing, a non-linear structure, and an abundance of characters. It reads much like a true historical account of a place, Manchester County, Virginia, and time, pre-Civil War 1800s. This could very nearly have passed for a non-fiction book; each character feels so......more