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Black History Month Adult Fiction
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Americanah
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Separated by respective ambitions after falling in love in occupied Nigeria, beautiful Ifemelu experiences triumph and defeat in America while exploring new concepts of race, while Obinze endures an undocumented status in London until the pair is reunited in their homeland 15 years later, where they face the toughest decisions of their lives.
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Kindred
by Octavia E. Butler
Dana, a Black woman, finds herself repeatedly transported to the antebellum South, where she must make sure that Rufus, the plantation owner's son, survives to father Dana's ancestor.
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Queenie
by Candice Carty-Williams
Constantly compared to her white middle-class peers, a young Jamaican-British woman in London makes a series of questionable decisions in the aftermath of a messy breakup before challenging herself to figure out who she wants to be.
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The Water Dancer
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Virginia slave narrowly escapes a drowning death through the intervention of a mysterious force that compels his escape and personal underground war against slavery
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Invisible Man
by Ralph Ellison
An African-American man's search for success and the American dream leads him out of college to Harlem and a growing sense of personal rejection and social invisibility.
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Hot Comb
by Ebony Flowers
A collection of graphic novel stories offers a look into the relationship between Black women and their hair, from a tale of a young girl's first perm to being the only Black player on a white softball team.
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Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations marked by wealth, slavery, war, coal mining, the Great Migration and the realities of 20th-century Harlem.
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How Long 'til Black Future Month?
by N. K. Jemisin
Offers a collection of the author's short fiction, including "The City Born Great," where a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis's soul.
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An American Marriage
by Tayari Jones
When her new husband is imprisoned for a crime she knows he did not commit, a rising artist takes comfort in a longtime friendship, only to encounter unexpected challenges in resuming her life when her husband's sentence is suddenly overturned.
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The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
by Ayana Mathis
Traces the story of Great Migration-era mother Hattie Shepherd, who in spite of poverty and a dysfunctional husband uses love and Southern remedies to raise nine children and prepare them for the realities of a harsh world.
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Behold the Dreamers
by Imbolo Mbue
Two marriages, one immigrant working class and the other from the top one percent, are shaped by financial circumstances, infidelities, secrets and the 2008 recession.
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The Good Lord Bird
by James McBride
Fleeing her violent master at the side of legendary abolitionist John Brown at the height of the slavery debate in mid-19th-century Kansas Territory, Henry pretends to be a girl to hide his identity throughout the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.
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Sula
by Toni Morrison
The intense friendship shared by Nel Wright and Sula Peace, two African-American women raised in an Ohio town, changes forever when one of them leaves home to roam the countryside and returns ten years later.
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We Cast a Shadow
by Maurice Carlos Ruffin
In a near-future South where an increasing number of people with dark skin endure cosmetic procedures to pass as white, a father embarks on an obsessive quest to protect his son, who bears a dark, spreading birthmark.
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The World Doesn't Require You: Stories
by Rion Amilcar Scott
This collection of short stories, set in fictional Cross River, Maryland, includes the tales of a struggling musician who is God’s last son and a Ph.D. candidate whose dissertation about a childhood game sparks a riot in a once-segregated town.
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A Kind of Freedom
by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Explores the legacy of racial disparity in the South through the story of three generations of an African American family in New Orleans.
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Heads of the Colored People: Stories
by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
In a collection of boundary-pushing stories that are touching, contemporary and darkly humorous, the author illuminates the simmering tensions and precariousness of Black citizenship and the concept of Black identity in this so-called post-racial era.
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Sing, Unburied, Sing
by Jesmyn Ward
Living with his grandparents and toddler sister on a Gulf Coast farm, Jojo navigates the challenges of his tormented mother's addictions and his grandmother's terminal cancer before the release of his father from prison prompts a road trip of danger and hope.
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Lot: Stories
by Bryan Washington
Coming of age in his family's Houston restaurant, a mixed-heritage teen navigates bullying, his newly discovered sexual orientation and the ripple effects of a disadvantaged community impacted by an affair, a youth baseball season and displaced hurricane survivors.
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The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
Chronicles the daring survival story of a cotton plantation slave in Georgia, who, after suffering at the hands of both her owners and fellow slaves, races through the Underground Railroad with a relentless slave-catcher close behind.
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