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African American Fiction June 2026 |
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Good Morning Means I Love You
by Kendra Allen
The electrifying and intimate first novel from the author of The Collection Plate and Fruit Punch, a searing story of a young Texan woman and the family she makes with two men A couple years after Noon and I fall in love, we fall in love with Micah--and a couple years after that, I have both of their babies. We choose, this land and this life. We share, ourselves and our sons. We name them, Morning and Night.In her arresting first novel, Kendra Allen investigates love, partnership, motherhood, pleasure and the pursuit of freedom in one young woman's defiantly unconventional terms. Rae has just returned to her family after leaving for a stretch and suddenly - that family being her two male partners and the sons, named Morning and Night, that she has mothered with each of them. In the span of one year, they will experience unfathomable depths of devastation--and joys they could never predict.Good Morning Means I Love You follows Rae as she makes choices around sex, mothering, and partnership that are as stunning to everyone else as they are natural to herself. With pain and pleasure, she watches as her children learn to walk and give language to the world as her lovers contend with their own ideas of masculinity, personhood, and fatherhood. Along the way, Rae begins to understand the hardest and most beautiful truth: that we have only so much time on earth to make love, to make family, and to make good on the promise of this one, short life.This is a novel of the self in all its simultaneities and a living portrait of intimacy written in poetic, bold, and sensual prose that shines a light on what it means to redefine expectation.
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Runner
by Ashton Lattimore
In this gripping, emotionally layered novel set in Prohibition-era Martha's Vineyard, a young woman from a Black seafaring family plunges into the dangerous world of rum-running to save her home and uncover the truth about her father's death. Martha's Vineyard, 1923. The sea was the gift that kept on giving to Lena Jameson's father, Earl, a fisherman turned successful rumrunner who built up a small fortune smuggling liquor from offshore ships to thirsty customers back on the island. But when Earl and his entire crew are lost in a mysterious shipwreck that some whisper was no accident, his loved ones are left reeling and penniless--and Lena, who'd been on the cusp of a college career in Boston, sees her future slipping away. Desperate to save her family as well as her own hopes of escaping their small town, Lena decides to take over Earl's rum-running business. For a crew, she ropes in Walter, her roguish big brother who leans too hard on the bottle; Sam, her steadfast local boyfriend who wants to keep her tethered to shore; and Dee, a glamorous young woman from Boston who is summering in the Vineyard and offers Lena a glimpse of the future that she still wants for herself--and who's keeping her own explosive secret. The foursome embarks on a journey from the quaint, colorful streets of Oak Bluffs through gangland Boston to the jazz-filled clubs of Harlem during its Renaissance, all in search of quick money--and the truth about the shipwreck. But as buried secrets rise to the surface and the temptations of the glittering underworld pull Lena in deeper, everything she's fought to protect soon hangs in the balance: her heart, her family, and her place in a world that's quick to condemn women who dare to want more.
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Die for Me
by Shirlene Obuobi
I'm obsessed. --Ali Hazelwood I never wanted it] to end...Stunning. --Lyla Sage What my eyes are showing me can't be possible. Can't be real. Because if they are, then I have to accept that Julian Conrad has been alive for a very long time. Too long to be human. A stay-up-all-night, smart, spicy romance following a doctor who finds herself falling for an alluring, much-younger man with a deadly secret Sean's not in the market for love. The only female, let alone Black, interventional cardiologist at her hospital, she's watched too many of her male colleagues divorce their first wives to marry younger models--and then there's the abusive relationship she's spent the better part of her early 30s healing from. Her passions are reserved for her best friend, her goddaughter, and her job. Then she meets Julian. Brooding, beautiful and eleven years her junior. In short: A bad idea. Julian pursues her in a way that sets off alarm bells in her mind, but she finds herself unable to resist their undeniable chemistry--even starts fantasizing about him in dreams that feel altogether too real. They also have a lot in common despite their age gap. So, to hell with it: If men can date younger, why can't she? But the more Sean gets to know him, the more impossible Julian seems: He has a depth and sorrow to him that's beyond his years, and sometimes there's a look in his eyes that's less than human, and leaves her feeling more like prey. Plus, Sean herself has been exhibiting odd symptoms--memory lapses, a lack of restraint that's unlike her, persistent exhaustion--that all trace back to Julian, making Sean feel more than a little afraid. Who--or what--is she falling, irrevocably, in love with? Extraordinarily transfixing, suspenseful, and addictive, Die for Me is nothing short of a seduction.
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Deadly Family Secrets
by K. D. Richards
A cold case has been reopened... and someone is killing to keep their secrets. Police Chief Tyson Morrow takes his job keeping the peace seriously. So when Olivia Lowell arrives in town, asking uncomfortable questions to find her birth parents, he's worried it will stir up trouble. But that doesn't mean he won't find out who she really is. Working together, he realizes unlocking her past is the key to solving a long-abandoned cold case. Then Olivia is attacked and he's left facing the truth of his feelings--about her and about his town. Because the secrets are coming to light, one way or another... From Harlequin Intrigue: Seek thrills. Solve crimes. Justice served. Discover more action-packed stories in the Guardians of Justice series. All books are stand-alone with uplifting endings but were published in the following order: Book 1: Killer on the PotomacBook 2: Death by DataBook 3: Cold Case Cover-UpBook 4: Deadly Family Secrets
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The Great Wherever
by Shannon Sanders
One of Esquire's 22 Most Anticipated Books of 2026One of Publishers Weekly's 10 Most Anticipated Literary Fiction titles for Spring/Summer 2026One of Literary Hub's and BookPage's Most Anticipated Books of 2026 The dead are relentless gossips, or at least these dead are.An impulsive and heartbroken woman inherits her father's share of a Tennessee farm that is rich in family secrets and occupied with busybody ghosts in this sweeping family portrait. At thirty-two, Aubrey Lamb is stumbling through adulthood. An underpaid gig worker in Washington, DC, she's grieving the end of a serious relationship and the recent loss of her father. When Aubrey learns she has inherited his stake in a sizable Tennessee farm she sees an opportunity to get out of the city--and to erase a mounting pile of debt. Watching her arrival with great interest are four ghosts--Aubrey's ancestors, who've staked their own claims to the farm and who never hesitate to pass judgment on the mistakes made by the living, whether romantic, financial, or sartorial. As Aubrey reconnects with her living family, another story unfolds in parallel: the history of the land, beginning with its purchase by Thomas, Aubrey's great-grandfather and one of the first Black landowners in his community. Though Thomas hopes to give his children a homestead on which they could flourish, the land proves to be a burdensome inheritance. Over the years, it turns the Lambs against one another, culminating in a catastrophic tragedy that splinters the family and echoes through the decades. Now, as the clock ticks on a potential sale of the farm, the ghosts fear expulsion from the home they've made, and Aubrey must weigh the hopes and burdens of her forebears with the very real needs of her future. An expansive family saga told with a wry and distinctly modern voice, The Great Wherever is at once grand and intimate; it explores the ways we learn to define ourselves through and against our families, how we carry on after loss, and how the past lives on in all of us.
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Cool Machine
by Colson Whitehead
From #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy 1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture's Dealer of the Month. When the banks won't give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind. 1983. To some, Carney's friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he's feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he's plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you're uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence--Pepper is a native speaker. 1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie's death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie's son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he's spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right. With his usual pitch-perfect prose, Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead's vivid characters, it's what's below the surface that reveals the truth.
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