Roots: The Saga of an American Family

Haley traces his family from Kunta Kinte's capture in Gambia through generations of American slavery. The accumulation of lives — stolen, broken, partially recovered — is staggering. No single scene is as devastating as the sheer length of it: slavery as a multigenerational project of erasure. Reading it now, you understand that Haley was writing against forgetting at exactly the moment forgetting was being organised.