In Andrea Bobotis' The Last List of Miss Judith Kratt, an affluent white woman nearing the end of her life in the 1980s takes stock of her family estate in Bound, South Carolina, while recounting the years she spent there as a child during the 1930s. The novel offers a riveting tale of family secrets, revenge, and, especially, racial oppression in the Jim Crow South. As the story unfolds, the narrator muses about how race relations in America have changed since the time of her youth. In this, the novel joins a growing body of work that thoughtfully probes the nation's sinister history of racism.

In recent years racial tension has reached frightening levels in the USA. In a February 2019 poll conducted by the Pew Research Centre, 58% of the public agreed that race relations are "generally bad" in the country; the same poll found that, at the same time, race is playing an ever-more important role in voter behavior. Race has moved to the center of the country's public discourse, and it...