|
|
African American Fiction October 2026 |
|
|
|
|
|
Truth to Power: A Luke Cage Marvel Crime Novel by S. A. CosbyLuke Cage plays detective and super hero when he uncovers a conspiracy turning vulnerable Americans into unwitting pawns of a madman.New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby (King of Ashes) writes an original crime novel starring Harlem’s unbreakable hero for the Marvel Crime thriller series for adult readers.With advanced cybernetics showing up in the possession of low-level criminals, Luke Cage is hired to investigate a factory manufacturing medical devices in rural Virginia. Leaving Jessica Jones during a delicate moment in their relationship, he makes plans to travel south but is devastated to learn that a cousin who scoped out the plant for him has been found dead. The police report states it was an accident. But Luke has long known that official words are just that: words.
Fueled by guilt and vengeance, Luke arrives in Virginia and promises his aunt he’ll get to the bottom of things. But danger lurks in every living room, barroom, and country road of Majestic, and the local sheriff’s barely concealed prejudices are ready to boil to the surface. Even ordinary people seem to have no qualms about testing their might against the hero from New York City.
|
|
|
|
Mazywood
by Tananarive Due
All the Sinners Bleed meets Erasure in this literary thriller from the award-winning author of The Reformatory following the grandson of a famous Black actress who returns to his grandmother's cabin retreat in the California mountains only to encounter the legacy of her rage born in Old Hollywood. When Johnny--a filmmaker and grandson of the famous Black actress Mazelle Washington--brings his family to Mazywood, the secluded California mountain lodge left behind by his grandmother, he expects a quiet retreat. Instead, he uncovers a legacy of rage, secrets, and terror that has haunted his family for generations. Set primarily in the present day, with haunting flashbacks to Hollywood's Golden Age, Mazywood explores three generations while following Johnny as he pieces together the true story of his grandmother. As a young Black actress whose career spanned from the 1920s to the 1940s, Mazelle brushed shoulders with giants like Lena Horne, Clark Gable, and Hattie McDaniel. But beneath her public appearance, she carried a secret she had kept and nurtured since she was a child, when a dark wish came true and changed the course of her life forever. Now, fifty years after Mazelle's death, Johnny finds himself confronting the truth she buried--and the consequences she left behind. For a monster lurks outside Mazywood, hidden for generations, and Johnny brought his family to its hunting grounds.
|
|
|
|
Their Unexpected Plan
by Donna Hill
A surprise addition to their business plan... Ascension Publishing's newly minted publisher Morgan Chambers has to make the organization profitable or risk everything he's ever worked for if it fails. Morgan doesn't have time for distractions like pretty Noa Dunnavant. He's only meeting with her to discuss her novel. Not the fact that he can't stop thinking about her. Noa's novel is the lightning rod the company needs. Her book's success is good for her ego, and covertly spending time with Morgan is good for her soul. But that little pink plus sign changes everything. A baby was never part of their plans. Will this plot twist begin their final chapter, or seal their happily-ever-after? From Harlequin Special Edition: Believe in love. Overcome obstacles. Find happiness. A Lowcountry Promise Novel Book 1: Their Unexpected Plan
|
|
|
|
The Unhaunting
by Micaiah Johnson
Award-winning author Micaiah Johnson invites you to Abernathy House. A house, itself, is nothing. It's not a shelter until it is sheltering someone. A house is a housefire, waiting for its match. A house is a ghost story, waiting for its death. At the end of the Civil War, a daughter of the Confederacy made what she thought was an innocent wish: to build a house where nothing bad could happen. But peace came at a price, and one hundred and seventy years later Shantell and her friends are about to discover where all that darkness ended up. When Shantell's best friend, Avery, tells her he has inherited a house big enough to make their dreams of a sanctuary come true, she's too cautious to be optimistic. A lifetime of loss -- her father to the Iraq war, her brother to police violence, and her mother to suicide -- has taught her cynicism, and even though Avery swears the house has never experienced a tragedy, she goes along expecting everything from black mold to evil spirits. But not only is the house in better shape than they'd expected, it makes them better too: Shantell's anxiety stops flaring up; terminally shallow Avery is suddenly capable of deeper emotions; and Tobias, Avery's older brother and the contractor for the job, even quits chain smoking. There's an eeriness to the calm, and it's almost a relief when they realize they do not walk alone in Abernathy House. If nothing bad has ever happened here, where are all these ghosts coming from? As they dig into the house's history, Shantell, Avery, and Tobias discover that there's only one thing worse than a house that's haunted: a house that desperately wants to be.
|
|
|
|
The Occidental Book of the Dead
by T. Geronimo Johnson
No one is having more fun with language than T. Geronimo Johnson. The way his mind works is endlessly entertaining, inviting us into a fantasia. Of men behaving badly in a world behaving worse. -- Attica Locke, New York Times bestselling author of Bluebird, BluebirdT. Geronimo Johnson plays cultural criticism like it's acid jazz.-- Ron Charles, The Washington PostFrom the PEN/Faulkner finalist and National Book Award longlisted author of Welcome to Braggsville, comes this audacious and darkly funny literary crime masterpiece centered on a Black cop in an Atlanta precinct, whose fa ade of white alliance begins to crumble after a highly publicized murderGeorge Washington Jonson is determined to forge a new life. After growing up in one of Atlanta's poorest housing projects, he enlists in the U.S. Army and finds some relief serving abroad. When events lead him back home, he joins the police force. It's 1992, and Jonson is patrolling the streets he grew up on alongside his new partner, a shady legacy cop and self-described redneck who takes Jonson under his wing.After a decade on the job, Jonson has fashioned a new life in an affluent suburb with his white wife and stepson, though he's still policing his old neighborhood, and now tasked with training hot-headed rookie recruits. One night on patrol a split-second confrontation with a white teenager takes a violent turn. That single gunshot sets into motion a series of escalating lies.When the white-washed veneer of Jonson's life begins to crack, the story splits, presenting two contrasting versions of the American experience as he's forced to confront the history that shaped him and the compromises required of a good man in a broken system.Employing a bold, inventive structure and spanning two fraught decades, vividly evoking the complexities of the South, and written with his trademark virtuosic dissonance, The Occidental Book of the Dead is a propulsive, pyrotechnic exploration of corruption and conspiracy in a nation divided.
|
|
|
|
My Person
by Téa Mutonji
T a Mutonji writes sharply about the subtle ruptures endemic to formative friendships. --Raven Leilani, bestselling author of Luster Searing . . . an essential new voice in contemporary fiction. --#1 New York Times bestselling author Carley Fortune Sexy, infuriating, and unbelievably fun to read . . . This is a writer who can read someone to filth in just one line. --Katie Yee, author of Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar A bold debut from an exhilarating, multi-award-winning young writer, following two lifelong friends who suddenly find themselves in an emotional deadlock when one abruptly proposes to break up after years of subtle betrayals. Best friends of over twenty years, Tania and Margot are preparing to host their monthly Sunday Loaf dinner party, when Tania tells Margot this isn't working for her anymore--they've been entangled for too long, she wants to unknow her. But how do you extricate yourself from someone whose family owns the apartment you live in, who has taken you in as their own, even claims you as their person? As Tania attempts to live her life loudly on the outskirts of Margot's bubble, Margot's past betrayals become increasingly clear. But she means well, doesn't she? They had felt like sisters from the start. Or had Tania just been blind to Margot's antics? Set in the framework of a tense will-they-won't-they break-up, Tania and Margot get entangled in a rigorous revision of history, their once delicate dance intensifying toward a frantic finale that neither person sees coming. A taut, piercing exploration of race and privilege, codependency, and the ways in which world-defining friendships can be both beautifully and excruciatingly life altering, My Person is an addicting, astutely observed novel from an astonishing new talent.
|
|
|
|
The Four Wives and Five Deaths of Richard Milford
by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
From the author of the multi-award-winning, National Book Award-longlisted, vivid, fast, funny, way-smart, and verbally inventive (George Saunders) story collection Heads of the Colored People, comes a sly, spry, literary debut novel about the murder of an infamous moonshiner and the cacophony of true stories a small town can tell about itself. Rich Milford is dead. At last. We find ourselves in 1920's Oklahoma, just far enough out of Tulsa, just long enough after the Race Massacre of 1921. For as long as anyone can remember, the Milfords have led plentiful lives on the backs of the townspeople of Newville. Now, on the ominous brink of the Great Depression and at the height of Prohibition, Richard Milford was an infamous moonshiner and womanizer who, it seems, finally crossed the wrong person at the wrong time. He's dead and buried with only his women to mourn him, but a question remains: Who killed him, and why? Top suspects are his four wives, Lally, Sophronia, Georgette, and Vivianne. But as their stories burst to light, the very idea of a true story comes apart before our eyes. In an electric follow-up to her acclaimed debut collection, Nafissa Thompson-Spires once again serves up a brilliant distillation of front-of-mind happenings--think, cults of personality, capitalism run amok in politics, and rampant societal distrust--structured like a stupefying line dance. In her uniquely powerful, humorous manner, Thompson-Spires takes on the interdependent clash of the traditional and the newfangled in this gobsmackingly excellent novel.
|
|
|
|
Majestic Hills
by Dawn Turner
A Black couple leaves their downtown Chicago condo for a new suburban subdivision, only to find themselves at the center of a maelstrom in this gripping page-turner from the award-winning author of Three Girls from Bronzeville. Tired of the daily drama in his emergency room, Dr. Langdon Blaque is in search of a place where he can leave the world behind. He loves his job and has no delusions about the suburbs being perfect, but he wants peace and quiet. His wife Josephine, a lawyer, grew up listening to her father's stories about the Jim Crow South, and sundown towns. She prefers the city. Still, she agrees to move with the caveat that they stay for a year and reassess. The tight-knit, predominantly white group of neighbors in Majestic Hills initially welcomes them with open arms. But beneath the veneer of privileged harmony, tensions simmer. When a horrifying crime rocks the community, the illusion of safety is shattered, and Josephine and Langdon find themselves at the heart of a brewing storm that pits neighbor against neighbor, exposes deeply ingrained prejudices, and threatens to implode into violence. As their experiment in suburban living ticks toward the one-year mark, the Blaques are pushed to a breaking point. Can they find a way to make a home in Majestic Hills? Or has the move put their future, their marriage, and even their safety in jeopardy?
|
|
|
|
|
|