Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Kind of Freedom | 2017 | Margaret Wilkerson Sexton | Buy |
| 2 | The Revisioners | 2019 | Margaret Wilkerson Sexton | Buy |
| 3 | On the Rooftop | 2022 | Margaret Wilkerson Sexton | Buy |
Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s three novels share a focus on Black family life and the weight of American history. A Kind of Freedom (2017) traces a New Orleans family from the 1940s through Hurricane Katrina. The Revisioners (2019) pairs a 1920s Louisiana grandmother with her modern-day descendant. On the Rooftop (2022) follows a family of singers in San Francisco’s Fillmore District during the 1950s.
A Kind of Freedom was Sexton’s debut and was longlisted for the National Book Award. The novel moves across three generations and three different eras in New Orleans, showing how choices made in one decade ripple forward into the next. The Revisioners shifts to a dual timeline structure, placing a formerly enslaved woman’s story next to her modern descendant’s struggles with a manipulative employer.
On the Rooftop takes the action from Louisiana to California. Set in 1950s San Francisco, it follows a mother who has pinned her hopes on her daughters’ singing group just as urban renewal threatens to tear apart the Fillmore District, a neighborhood once known as the Harlem of the West. Sexton’s writing is grounded in place and family, and each novel stands alone while sharing her larger concern with how history shapes the present.