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A Book by a Black Author February |
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Chain Gang All Stars
by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
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, hotly-anticipated debut novel.
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Honey and Spice
by Bolu Babalola
Sharp-tongued (and secretly soft-hearted) Kiki Banjo has just made a huge mistake. As an expert in relationship-evasion and the host of the popular student radio show Brown Sugar, she's made it her mission to make sure the women of the African-Caribbean Society at Whitewell University do not fall into the mess of 'situationships, ' players, and heartbreak. But when the Queen of the Unbothered kisses Malakai Korede, the guy she just publicly denounced as The Wastemen of Whitewell, in front of every Blackwellian on campus, she finds her show on the brink. They're soon embroiled in a fake relationship to try and salvage their reputations and save their futures.
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Cursed Daughters: A Read with Jenna Pick
by Oyinkan Braithwaite
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.
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Seven Days in June
by Tia Williams
Brooklynite Eva Mercy is a single mom and bestselling erotica writer, who is feeling pressed from all sides. Shane Hall is a reclusive, enigmatic, award-winning literary author who, to everyone's surprise, shows up in New York. When Shane and Eva meet unexpectedly at a literary event, sparks fly, raising not only their past buried traumas, but the eyebrows of New York's Black literati. What no one knows is that twenty years earlier, teenage Eva and Shane spent one crazy, torrid week madly in love. They may be pretending that everything is fine now, but they can't deny their chemistry-or the fact that they've been secretly writing to each other in their books ever since. Over the next seven days in the middle of a steamy Brooklyn summer, Eva and Shane reconnect, but Eva's not sure how she can trust the man who broke her heart, and she needs to get him out of New York so that her life can return to normal. But before Shane disappears again, there are a few questions she needs answered.
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Sky Full of Elephants
by Cebo Campbell
In a world without white people, what does it mean to be Black? One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he's now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn't even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family. Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across a truly post-racial America in search for answers.
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The King Must Die
by Kemi Ashing-Giwa
Fen's world is crumbling. Newearth, a once-promising planet gifted by the all-powerful alien Makers, now suffers from failed terraforming, leaving its people on the brink of collapse. Fen has spent her life working as a mercenary bodyguard for a cunning magistrate, entangled in the politics of the empire that shattered her family. But then her fathers--her last remaining tether to hope--are executed by the ruthless Sovereign, who marks Fen for the same fate. With nothing left to lose, Fen escapes with a single map and an old quarterstaff, embarking on a dangerous quest to seek out the last remnants of her parents' rebellion.
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Riot Baby
by Tochi Onyebuchi
A global dystopian narrative and an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience. Ella and Kev are brother and sister, both gifted with extraordinary power. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by structural racism and brutality. Their futures might alter the world. When Kev is incarcerated for the crime of being a young black man in America, Ella--through visits both mundane and supernatural--tries to show him the way to a revolution that could burn it all down.
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Get a Life, Chloe Brown
by Talia Hibbert
A witty, hilarious romantic comedy about a woman who's tired of being boring and recruits her mysterious, sexy neighbor to help her experience new things--perfect for fans of Sally Thorne, Jasmine Guillory, and Helen Hoang!
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Palaver
by Bryan Washington
The story of a mother and a son, estranged for ten years, reconnecting in the son's chosen city of Tokyo in the weeks leading up to Christmas.
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Minor Black Figures
by Brandon Taylor
New York simmers with heat and unrest as Wyeth, a painter, finds himself at an impasse in his own work. After attending a dubious show put on by a collective of careerist artists, he retreats to a bar in the West Village where he meets Keating, a former seminarian. Over the long summer, as the two get to know each another, they talk and argue about God, sex, and art. Meanwhile, at his job working for an art restorer, Wyeth begins to investigate the life and career of a forgotten, minor black artist. His search yields potential answers to questions that Wyeth is only now beginning to ask about what it means to be a black artist making black art amid the mess and beauty of life itself.
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Masquerade
by O. O. Sangoyomi
Masquerade is an immersive, one-of-a-kind storyset in a reimagined 15th century West Africa that explores the true cost of one woman's fight for freedom and self-discovery, and the lengths she'll go to secure her future.
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Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hailed by Toni Morrison as required reading, a bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race.
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Ghostroots: Stories
by 'Pemi Aguda
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award A Time, Vulture, and Elle Best Book of the Year A marvelously unsettling collection where the everyday strangeness of life and the uncanny rub up against each other.
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The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead
In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.
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Beloved
by Toni Morrison
This brutally powerful, mesmerizing story is an unflinchingly look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years. Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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Parable of the Sower
by Octavia E. Butler
When global climate change and economic crises lead to social chaos in the early 2020s, California becomes full of dangers, from pervasive water shortage to masses of vagabonds who will do anything to live to see another day. Fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside a gated community with her preacher father, family, and neighbors, sheltered from the surrounding anarchy. In a society where any vulnerability is a risk, she suffers from hyperempathy, a debilitating sensitivity to others' emotions. Precocious and clear-eyed, Lauren must make her voice heard in order to protect her loved ones from the imminent disasters her small community stubbornly ignores. But what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: the birth of a new faith . . . and a startling vision of human destiny.
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.
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Psychopomp & Circumstance
by Eden Royce
Phee St. Margaret is a daughter of the Reconstruction, born to a family of free Black business owners in New Charleston. Coddled to within an inch of her life by a mother who refuses to let her daughter live a life other than the one she dictates, Phee yearns to demonstrate she's capable of more than simply marrying well. When word arrives that her Aunt Cleo, long estranged from the family, has passed away, Phee risks her mother's wrath to step up and accept the role of pomp-the highly honored duty of planning the funeral service. Traveling alone to the town of Horizon and her aunt's unsettling home, Phee soon discovers that visions and shadows beckon from every reflective surface, and that some secrets transcend the borders of life and death.
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The City We Became
by N. K. Jemisin
Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She's got six. When a young man crosses the bridge into New York City, something changes. He doesn't remember who he is, where he's from, or even his own name. But he can feel the pulse of the city, can see its history, can access its magic. And he's not the only one. All across the boroughs, strange things are happening. Something is threatening to destroy the city and her six newborn avatars unless they can come together and stop it once and for all.
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Death of the Author
by Nnedi Okorafor
In this exhilarating tale by New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor, a disabled Nigerian American woman pens a wildly successful Sci-Fi novel, but as her fame rises, she loses control of the narrative--a surprisingly cutting, yet heartfelt drama about art and love, identity and connection, and, ultimately, what makes us human.
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