Books by Contemporary Black Authors

Jane hopes her life will turn around as she and her family house-sit in a luxurious home in the hills of Los Angeles. During her sabbatical, she aims to finish her novel. But when things go wrong, she turns to Hollywood and meets producer Hampton Ford. They start developing a biracial comedy, but things take a turn. A brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia. 

A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system. This debut of a blazingly original voice “bursts at the seams of every page and swallows you whole” (Tommy Orange, author of There There).

A publishing event ten years in the making — an exquisite new novel by the bestselling and award-winning author of Americanah and We Should All Be Feminists — the story of four women and their loves, longings, and desires. In Dream Count, Adichie trains her fierce eye on these women in a sparkling, transcendent novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. Is true happiness ever attainable or is it just a fleeting state? And how honest must we be with ourselves to love, and to be loved?

In her debut novel,  award-winning poet DéLana R. A. Dameron introduces us to Mika Tabor, the youngest in her family, growing up in an all-Black working-class suburb of Columbia, South Carolina. Through the stories and struggles of her exhausted parents, who juggle multiple jobs while ensuring family adventures, her sister who prefers Alanis Morissette over Motown, her retired grandparents who overcame Jim Crow to build a legacy, and the tight-knit community dedicated to joy and resilience, Mika learns invaluable life lessons.

It’s 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. A fresh and intimate portrait of desire, consumption, and reckless abandon, Come and Get It is a tension-filled story about money, indiscretion, and bad behavior — and the highly anticipated new novel by acclaimed and award-winning author Kiley Reid.

Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far removed from America’s own in this explosive debut novel. Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system’s unholy alli­ance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country means.

In 1972, a skeleton was found in a well in Pottstown, PA, revealing long-held secrets of Chicken Hill, a neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side. When the truth about Chicken Hill and the town’s white establishment is revealed, McBride shows that even in dark times, it is love and community —heaven and earth — that sustain us.

Farrah, a young, calculating girl manipulates her way into the lives of her best friend’s white, wealthy, adoptive family but soon suspects she may not be the only one with ulterior motives. Told in Farrah’s chilling, unforgettable voice and weaving in searing commentary on race and class, this slow-burn social horror will keep you on the edge of your seat until the last page.

A sweeping and beautifully rendered exploration of home and yearning, following the fracturing of a family upon the demise of its patriarch. Intimately drawn and set against a fraught political backdrop, yet equally full of hope, humor, and humanity, A House for Alice traces the scars of grief and betrayal across generations and uncovers the secrets we keep from those closest to us.

From The New York Times-bestselling author of The Mothers, a stunning new novel about twin sisters, inseparable as children, who ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one Black and one white.

Aima and Kalu are a longtime couple who have just split. When Kalu, reeling from the breakup, visits an exclusive sex party hosted by his best friend, Ahmed, he makes a decision that will plunge them all into chaos, brutally and suddenly upending their lives. Ola and Souraya, two Nigerian sex workers visiting from Kuala Lumpur, collide into the scene just as everything goes to hell. Sucked into the city’s corrupt and glittering underworld, they’re all looking for a way out, fueled by a desperate need to escape the dangerous threat that looms over them.

A gripping page-turner from the celebrated author of book club favorite The Violin Conspiracy: Music professor Bern Hendricks discovers a shocking secret about the most famous American composer of all time — his music may have been stolen from a Black Jazz Age prodigy named Josephine Reed. Determined to uncover the truth that a powerful organization wants to keep hidden, Bern will stop at nothing to right history’s wrongs and give Josephine the recognition she deserves.

This searing multi-generational novel — set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama — follows a mother fighting for her sanity and survival. Brilliant, explosive, vitally important new work from one of America’s most fiercely talented storytellers.

In this moving debut novel, two estranged siblings must set aside their differences to deal with their mother’s death and her hidden past — a journey of discovery that takes them from the Caribbean to London to California and ends with her famous black cake.

A mythic love story set in Trinidad, Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s radiant debut is a masterwork of lush imagination and exuberant storytelling — a spellbinding and hopeful novel about inheritance, loss, and love’s seismic power to heal.

A spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter’s discovery that she has the power to change her family’s legacy. Unfolding over seventy years through a chorus of unforgettable voices that move back and forth in time, Memphis paints an indelible portrait of inheritance, celebrating the full complexity of what we pass down, in a family and as a country: brutality and justice, faith and forgiveness, sacrifice and love.

From acclaimed and bestselling novelist Zadie Smith, a kaleidoscopic work of historical fiction set against the legal trial that divided Victorian England. Based on real historical events, The Fraud is a dazzling novel about truth and fiction, Jamaica and Britain, fraudulence and authenticity, and the mystery of “other people.”

A singular and stunning debut novel about the forbidden union between two enslaved young men on a Deep South plantation, the refuge they find in each other, and a betrayal that threatens their existence.

Two Black sisters growing up in small-town New England fight to protect their home, their bodies, and their dreams as the Civil Rights Movement sweeps the nation in Promise, a “magical, magnificent novel” (Marlon James) from “a startlingly fresh voice” (Jacqueline Woodson).

An irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss. Spanning Los Angeles, Houston, and Osaka, Family Meal is a story about how the people who know us the longest can hurt us the most, but how they also set the standard for love. With his signature generosity and eye for food, sex, love, and the moments that make us the most human, Bryan Washington returns with a brilliant new novel.

The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Harlem Shuffle continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory. Crook Manifesto is a darkly funny tale of a city under siege, but also a sneakily searching portrait of the meaning of family.  Colson Whitehead’s kaleidoscopic portrait of Harlem is sure to stand as one of the all-time great evocations of a place and a time.

A gripping historical novel about a spirited girl who joins a sisterhood working to undermine the Confederates. The American Daughters is a novel of hope and triumph that reminds us what is possible when a community bands together to fight for their freedom.

A dazzling and moving novel about family, identity, and race, What the Fireflies Knew poignantly reveals that heartbreaking but necessary component of growing up — the realization that loved ones can be flawed and that the perfect family we all dream of looks different up close.

Blue skies, empty land — and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere, and an “absorbing, powerful” (BuzzFeed) new vision of the American West, from the award-winning author of The Changeling.

A sweeping, heart-racing, mystical novel about a university student in Lagos trying to save his brother, and himself, amid the chaos of Nigeria’s civil war — a story of love, friendship, and personal triumph by the two-time Booker Prize finalist and “the heir to Chinua Achebe” (New York Times)

Following her New York Times bestselling debut Fifty Words for Rain, Asha Lemmie’s next sweeping and evocative novel introduces a determined young woman’s search for the larger-than-life literary figure she believes to be her father.

A searing and tender novel about a young Black journalist’s search for answers in the unsolved murder of her great-grandfather in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, decades ago — inspired by the author’s own family history.

A Read With Jenna Book Club Pick

Yaa Gyasi’s stunning follow-up to her acclaimed novel Homegoing is “a book of blazing brilliance” (The Washington Post) — a powerful, raw, intimate, deeply layered novel about a Ghanaian family in Alabama.

A ballerina at the height of her powers becomes consumed with finding her missing brother in this “striking debut” (Oprah Daily). Written with spellbinding beauty and ballet’s precise structure, Dances centers around women, art, and power, and how we come to define freedom for ourselves.