The Best Audiobooks by Black Authors

From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah’s Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them. “A murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel … Charming, smart, heart-blistering, and heart-healing” (Danez Smith, The New York Times Book Review).

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. Brimming with the electrifying humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before.

Who hasn’t wanted to murder an ex — figuratively, at least? In this explosive debut thriller, a woman’s seemingly perfect romantic life is on the verge of collapse as she uncovers a hidden history surfacing dark secrets that have deadly consequences.

From the bestselling author of Set Boundaries, Find Peace, a relatable guide to understanding codependency, enmeshment, and what it means to get our needs met for real. Discover new ways to identify your needs, navigate conflict, and find more harmony and trust with your spouse or partner, close friends, family members, and the other important people in your life.

Here is a page-turning chronicle of family love and heartbreak, loss and perseverance, and the kind of creativity, audacity, and will it takes for a girl from Galveston to change the world. Matriarch is one brilliant woman’s intimate and revealing story, and a multigenerational family saga that carries within it the story of America — and the wisdom that women pass on to each other, mothers to daughters, across generations.

From Zadie Smith, one of the most beloved authors of her generation, a new collection of essays. Arranged in five sections — In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free — this collection poses questions we immediately recognize, offering a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith’s own life. This is literary journalism at its zenith.

National Book Award winner Jacqueline Woodson’s stirring novel-in-verse explores how a family moves forward when their glory days have passed and the cost of professional sports on Black bodies.

She found the literary voices that would inspire the world … The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance, written by Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Personal Librarian.

The renowned author of Between the World and Me journeys to three resonant sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell — and the ones we don’t — shape our realities. Written at a dramatic moment in American and global life, this work from one of the country’s most important writers is about the urgent need to untangle ourselves from the destructive myths that shape our world — and our own souls — and embrace the liberating power of even the most difficult truths.

As the Civil War looms, a young girl must face a life-altering decision after awakening her sister’s ghost in this “poignant story of love, family, and friendship [that] celebrates the power of liberation” (People).

In this nostalgic and raucous collection of sixteen original essays, Ira Madison III — critic, television writer, and host of the beloved Keep It podcast — combines memoir and criticism to offer a brand-new pop-culture manifesto. Brimming with a profound love for a bygone culture and alternating between irreverence and heartfelt insight, Pure Innocent Fun, like all the best products of pop culture, will leave you entertained and surprisingly enlightened.

The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the bestselling author of Black Cake, a Read with Jenna Book Club pick.

Why don’t our schools work? Eve L. Ewing tackles this question from a new angle: What if they’re actually doing what they were built to do? She argues that instead of being the great equalizer, America’s classrooms were designed to do the opposite: To maintain the nation’s inequalities. It’s a task at which they excel.

This follow-up to The Underground Railroad brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.