Books by Contemporary Black Authors

A young woman must shake off a family curse and the widely held belief that she is the reincarnation of her dead cousin in this wickedly funny, brilliantly perceptive novel about love, female rivalry, and superstition from the author of the smash hit My Sister, the Serial Killer. “A bombshell of a book … Sharp, explosive, hilarious” (New York Times).

She found the literary voice 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.

From the author of Oprah’s Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle. Full of heart and life and hope, set against the shifting sands of these friends’ secrets and betrayals, The Girls Who Grew Big confirms Leila Mottley’s promise and offers an explosive new perspective on what it means to be a young woman.

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?

From “literary superstar” (The Boston Globe) and Booker Prize finalist Brandon Taylor, his “most accomplished novel” (The New York Times): The story of a gay Black painter navigating the worlds of art, desire, and creativity. Minor Black Figures is a vividly etched portrait, both sweeping and tender, of friendship, creativity, belief, and the deep connections among them.

A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage — Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

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).

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.

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.

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. 

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.

An extraordinary short story collection about community, home, betrayal, and forgiveness — from a writer whose “spellbinding, buoyant” (Texas Monthly) storytelling will break your heart as it tends to the wounds. This collection peers deeply into lives of women and men experiencing intimate and magnificent reckonings — exploring how race, power, and inequality map on the individual, and demonstrating the mythic proportions of everyday life.

From an Emmy Award-winning writer comes a funny, wise, heartbreaking story about a woman journeying into the unknown in the wake of sudden loss. What happens when we admit that the deepest feelings never die? How do we reconcile various — and sometimes contradictory — truths about those closest to us? An engrossing and profoundly moving coming-of-age story with a powerful love at its heart, Loved One is poised to become an instant classic.

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.

You know my name, but you do not know me. Your historians call me seductress, but I was ever in love’s thrall. Your playwrights speak of witchcraft, but my talents came from the gods themselves. Your poets sing of my bloodlust, but I was always protecting my children. How willfully they refuse to concede that a woman could be powerful, strategic, and divinely blessed to rule. Death will silence me no longer. This is not the story of how I died. But how I lived … Cleopatra tells her own story in this evocative and sensuous historical epic from the bestselling and award-winning author of Faebound and The Final Strife.

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.

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 masterful story that asks: What if the different sides of your personality had trust issues with each other? Kinga is a woman who is just trying to make it through the week. There’s a Kinga for every day: On Mondays, you can catch Kinga-A deleting food delivery apps. By Friday, Kinga-E is happy to spend the days soaking, wine-drunk, in the bath. It’s an arrangement that’s not without its fair share of admin, grudges, and half-truths. But when Kinga-A discovers a man tied up in their apartment, the Kingas have to reckon with the possibility that one of them might be planning to destroy them all.

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.

The Longe siblings are really botching their parents’ American Dream. “A warm, smart, hilarious, delicious, riveting” (Curtis Sittenfeld) debut about the uncomfortable, unbreakable ties of family as four adult siblings come home to confront the state of their own lives and each other.

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.

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 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.