Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

Themes: Identity, self-realization, Black womanhood, love, freedom, voice, community, resilience, the courage to begin again.
 
This novel centers on the life of Janie, an African American woman navigating selfhood, love and freedom in the American South. It is the story of a woman who spends the first half of her life living inside other people's definitions of who she should be, and the second half of her life finding out who she actually is. Hurston writes in a voice so rich and alive that the pages feel warm to the touch. The dialogue sings. The landscape breathes. And Janie's journey toward her own voice, her own choices, her own understanding of what love should feel like, is one of the most honest portrayals of a woman becoming fully herself in all of literature. Hurston's work is lively, lyrical, funny and poignant, and this novel, often acclaimed as her masterpiece, offers a compelling synthesis of community, culture and deeply felt individual experience. For anyone who has ever swallowed their own voice to keep the peace, or stayed somewhere too small for too long, or wondered whether it is too late to begin again: Janie's story says it is never too late. The horizon is still there. It has been waiting for you all along.