Purchase a copy here! Britt Bennett’s debut novel, The Mothers begins, “All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we’d taken a moment to swish this one around in our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.”… Continue reading The Mothers by Brit Bennett
Tag: booksbyblackwriters
An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Purchase a copy for yourself here! By all appearances, newly married college grads Roy and Celestial are living the dream as an upwardly mobile and passionately in love black couple in Atlanta. But their marriage is at once torn asunder, on a night when the couple is staying in a hotel in Louisiana on a… Continue reading An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
Stay with Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
Purchase a copy for yourself here! In the late 1980s—amidst a great deal of political turmoil in Nigeria—university students Yejide and Akin fall in love hard and fast. The modern and highly educated couple resolves not to partake in the traditional Nigerian practice of polygamy, where a husband acquires a series of wives who bear… Continue reading Stay with Me by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Black Leopard Red Wolf is the most recent novel from Jamaican author Marlon James, and the follow up to his Man Booker Prize-winning 2014 novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. James has stated that this novel is the first in his Dark Star trilogy, which will be a… Continue reading Black Leopard Red Wolf by Marlon James
Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Jacqueline Woodson, author of the National Book Award-winning memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, revisits the concerns that animate many of her young adult novels, chief among them being an exploration of what it means to be a young black woman in America, in her recent novel, Red at the Bone.… Continue reading Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste
Purchase a copy for yourself here! The story of war has always been a masculine story, but this was not true for Ethiopia and it has never been that way in any form of struggle. This is a line from the Author’s Note of Maaza Mengiste’s second novel, The Shadow King. The novel is a… Continue reading The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste
The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s second novel, The Revisioners, is a sprawling multigenerational tale about the pain and wisdom that is passed on through generations. The book is centered on two perspectives and in two time periods, one being 1924, well into the Jim Crow south in New Orleans, and the… Continue reading The Revisioners by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Oyinkan Braithwaite’s debut novel is a richly textured story concerned with loyalty and compassion imagined within the confines of tight crime-novel pacing. Braithwaite’s masterful prose and sharp wit gave me that rare feeling when I finished the novel that I had not actually taken a breath since starting it.… Continue reading My Sister the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Purchase a copy for yourself here! Ta-Nehisi Coates’ hotly anticipated debut novel The Water Dancer is a lyrical creation from one of America’s foremost cultural critics. Coates is a widely read essayist and former national correspondent for The Atlantic, the author of such nonfiction bestsellers as Between the World and Me and We Were Eight… Continue reading The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates