Harare Review of Books

By

Jacqueline

·

Books from African authors and authors of African descent to look forward to in 2025 (Updated)

Here’s your list of 2025 books from authors on the continent and in the Diaspora, sorted by month. There’s absolutely no way I could list every book that’s coming, but here’s what I think is notable—a work in progress, subject to updates.

You can support your favourite authors, my work, and independent bookstores by pre-ordering what catches your eye on Bookshop (click on links below, and here’s the full list on Bookshop.org).

If there’s a particular book that’s caught your eye, here’s more detail below from publishers, as available. Please note that publication dates may change.

Some highlights: New fiction from Eloghosa Osunde! Nnedi Okorafor! Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie! Abdulrazak Gurnah! Ben Okri! Helen Oyeyemi! Mia Couto! Tobi Ogundiran! Iryn Tushabe! Lolá Ákínmádé Åkerström! Youssef Rakha! Yrsa Daley-Ward!(!) Moussa Ould Ebnou! Natasha Brown! The editing team of Olivia Kidula and Somto Ihezue! Adam Oyebanji! Tochi Onyebuchi …Blair Underwood?! Non-fiction from Ytasha Womack! Imani Perry! Marlene L. Daut! Howard W. French! Jamaica Kincaid! Nikki Giovanni! Char Adams! Collected African stories edited by Ben Okri (again) and Helen Nde! Memoirs from Freda Epum and Caroline A. Wanga! Poetry from Abdourahman A. Waberi, Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Donika Kelly, and Tramaine Suubi! And a reissue of Greg Tate! Check out details below.

January

February

  • Harlem Rhapsody – Victoria Christopher Murray
    The extraordinary story of the woman who ignited the Harlem Renaissance, written by Victoria Christopher Murray, New York Times bestselling coauthor of The Personal Librarian.
  • The Wounds Are the Witness – Yolanda Pierce
    From Dr. Yolanda Pierce comes a searching meditation on Black faith, suffering, hope, and the healing work of justice.
  • Fearless and Free – Josephine Baker
    Published in the US for the first time, Fearless and Free is the memoir of the fabulous, rule-breaking, one-of-a-kind Josephine Baker, the iconic dancer, singer, spy, and Civil Rights activist.
  • The Dissenters – Youssef Rakha
    A transgressive novel by an acclaimed writer that spans seventy years of Egyptian history… Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.
  • The Edge of Water – Olufunke Grace Bankole
    Set between Nigeria and New Orleans, The Edge of Water tells the story of a young woman who dreams of life in America, as the collision of traditional prophecy and individual longing tests the bonds of a family during a devastating storm.
  • Season of Light – Julie Iromuanya
    For fans of Behold the Dreamers, immigrant stories, and family sagas, a compelling novel about a tightly bound Nigerian family living in Florida and the wounds that get passed down from generation to generation, by the significant new literary voice who wrote the acclaimed Mr. and Mrs. Doctor.
  • Mainline Mama: A Memoir by Keeonna Harris
    A powerful and wrenchingly intimate memoir about the formidable challenge of raising a family separated by prison walls and how we can fight back against a broken byzantine system.
  • Salutation Road – Salma Ibrahim
    A beautifully told literary debut for fans of Nadifa Mohamed and Mohsin Hamid.
  • Becoming Spectacular – Jennifer Jones
    The first African American Rockette charts her journey to one of the world’s most celebrated dance troupes in this gripping memoir that, for the first time, goes behind the velvet curtains at Radio City’s legendary holiday show.
  • African Stories – Ben Okri
    A Pocket Classics hardcover collection of a century of 36 terrific stories by major writers from across Africa, selected by the Booker Prize-winning Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri.
  • Casualties of Truth – Lauren Francis-Sharma
    From the author of Book of the Little Axe, nominated for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a riveting literary novel with the sharp edges of a thriller about the abuses of history and the costs of revenge, set between Washington, DC, and Johannesburg, South Africa.

March

  • When We Only Have the Earth – Abdourahman A Waberi, Nancy Naomi Carson
    French-Djiboutian poet, novelist and essayist Abdourahman A. Waberi sounds the alarm about our imperiled planet.
  • Dream Count – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    A sweeping story about four women whose lives are shaped by love, longing, and pain.
  • Madame Sosostris and the Festival for the Brokenhearted – Ben Okri
    In this modern fable with the impish magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a masked ball makes two upper-class British couples see each other in a new light.
  • The Watkins Book of African Folklore – Helen Nde
    A rich, contemporary and entertaining collection of 50 African folk tales with commentary from noted folklorist Helen Nde.
  • Universality – Natasha Brown
    Late one night on a Yorkshire farm, in the midst of an illegal rave, a young man is nearly bludgeoned to death with a solid gold bar. An ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement that has taken up residence on the farm…
  • Akogun: Brutalizer of Gods – Murewa Ayodele
    In an age thought forgotten . . . when man, monster, and the divine all strode the Earth . . . a lone warrior emerges to test the immortality of the cruel gods who would deal destruction with impunity.
  • Theft – Abdulrazak Gurnah
    In his first new novel since winning the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, a master storyteller captures young people in Tanzania in a time of dizzying global change.
  • Cry Revenge – Donald Goines (re-issue)
    The streets run red with blood when war breaks out between Blacks and Chicanos.
  • The Afrofuturist Evolution – Ytasha L Womack
    Drawing on disparate philosophies and science behind electronic beat-making, lyricism, dance, memory, myth, and cosmology in the African and African Disaporic traditions, this book seeks to demonstrate relationships between rhythm, space, and ways of being as an articulation of futures and alternate realities made present.
  • Dream Hotel – Laila Lalami
    Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.

April

  • Happy Land – Dolen Perkins-Valdez
    A woman learns the astonishing truth of her family’s ties to a vanished American Kingdom in this riveting new novel from the New York Times bestselling, NAACP Image Award-winning author of Take My Hand.
  • No One Left Alone: A Story of How Community Helps Us Heal – Liz Walker
    An extraordinary account of a Black church that decided to give neighbors a space to share their grief, No One Left Alone provides a blueprint premised on a simple truth: the wounded heal best together.
  • Prose to the People – Katie Mitchell
    A stunning visual homage to Black bookstores around the country along with profiles and essays that celebrate the history, community, activism, and culture these spaces embody, featuring an original foreword by Nikki Giovanni.
  • The Creation of Half-Broken People – Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
    Showcasing African Gothic at its finest, this hypnotic novel tangles together classic texts of madness and female rebellion alongside elements of the jingoistic novels of Victorian adventurer H. Rider Haggard.
  • Fish Tales – Nettie Jones
    This lost classic takes a mesmerizing spin through the high-rolling high times of 1970s New York and Detroit.
  • Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slaver’s Wake – Judith Weisenfeld
    Drawing on extensive archival research, Black Religion in the Madhouse is the first book to expose how racist views of Black religion in slavery’s wake shaped the rise of psychiatry as an established and powerful profession.
  • Fugitive Tilts – Ishion Hutchinson
    Ishion Hutchinson turns his poetic sensibility to questions of home, displacement, and memory in his beautiful and searingly brilliant prose debut.
  • Mojo Hand by J.J. Phillips
    Race, obsession, and the blues are the themes of this wildly original novel by African American poet, novelist, and activist J. J. Phillips.
  • Afia in the Land of Wonders – Mia Araujo
    In her stunning literary debut, Mia Araujo presents a gorgeous reimagining of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, spinning a new story that is accompanied by arresting, ethereal illustrations about twin sisters and how one must venture outside the safety of their home, into the wilderness, in order to find herself and true happiness.
  • Zeal – Morgan Jerkins
    The New York Times bestselling author of This Will Be My Undoing and Caul Baby returns with an epic, multi-generational novel that illuminates the legacy of slavery and the power of romantic love.
  • Everything is Fine Here – Iryn Tushabe
    A tender coming of age novel set in Uganda in which a young woman grapples with the truth about her sister in a country that punishes gay people.
  • Gold Coast Dilemma – Nana Malone
    From USA TODAY bestselling author Nana Malone, a romance about a Ghanaian American heiress faced with with the dilemma of choosing between culture and a love connection.
  • One Way Witch – Nnedi Okorafor
    Set in the universe Africanfuturist luminary Nnedi Okorafor first introduced in the World Fantasy Award-winning Who Fears Death, One Way Witch is the second in the She Who Knows trilogy.
  • Somadina – Akwaeke Emezi
    From the National Book Award finalist and author of Pet comes a novel set in a magical West African world, about a teen girl who must save her missing twin while learning to navigate her own terrifying new powers.
  • Black Friday – Cheryl Ntumy
    A stunning collection.

May

  • Reading Du Bois: An Afrocentric Critique of the Color Line – Molefi Kete Asante and Aaron X. Smith
    Offering a vision both hopeful and thoughtful, Reading Du Bois is an Afrocentric reexamination of the work of one of the most important intellectuals of our time.
  • I’m Highly Percent Sure – Caroline A. Wanga
    In this rich, intelligent, and witty memoir, the President and CEO of Essence Ventures—a woman with a defiant intuition who rejects cultural expectations and outside influence—tells how she charted her own destiny, offering inspiration and advice to help everyone on their own journey to becoming everything they were born to be.
  • Bitter Honey – Lolá Ákínmádé Åkerström
    Spanning four decades and three continents, Bitter Honey is a story of mothers, daughters, and the importance of carving your own path.
  • Sing the Truth: The Kweli Journal Short Story Collection – Laura Pegram
    A powerful must-read collection of bold BIPOC voices.
  • Esperance – Adam Oyebanji
    The history-bending speculative fiction from Adam Oyebanji, award-winning author of BRAKING DAY.
  • Sins of Survivors: A Carter Brothers Novel – Blair Underwood and Joe McClean
    Harlem Shuffle meets The Godfather in this fierce and dazzling crime family saga presented by award-winning actor and producer Blair Underwood and written by filmmaker Joe McClean, set in the Black Bottom neighborhood of Detroit in the dark and dangerous days of the 1930s.
  • Marsha – Tourmaline
    Black transgender luminary Tourmaline brings to life the first definitive biography of the revolutionary activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the most important and remarkable figures in LGBTQIA+ history, revealing her story, her impact, and her legacy.
  • Harmattan Season – Tochi Onyebuchi
    Award-winning author Tochi Onyebuchi’s new standalone novel is hardboiled fantasy noir: Raymond Chandler meets P. Djèlí Clark in a postcolonial West Africa.
  • The Dark Maestro – Brendan Slocumb
    From the author of The Violin Conspiracy and Symphony of Secrets comes a mesmerizing page-turner about a musical virtuoso who’s forced into hiding when his family runs afoul of a ruthless criminal organization—and how he uses music to bring his enemies to justice.
  • The Devil Three Times – Rickey Fayne
    An audacious debut spanning eight generations of a Black family in West Tennessee as they are repeatedly visited by the Devil.
  • Can’t Get Enough – Kennedy Ryan
    Hendrix Barry lives a fabulous life. She has phenomenal friends, a loving family, and a thriving business that places her in the entertainment industry’s rarefied air. Your vision board? She’s probably living it. She’s a woman with goals, dreams, ambitions—always striving upward. And in the midst of everything, she’s facing her toughest challenge yet: caring for an aging parent. Who has time for romance? From her experience, there’s a low ROI on relationships. She hasn’t met the man who can keep up with her anyway. Until… him.

June

  • Black Crossword: 100 MIDI Puzzles Connecting the African Diaspora – Juliana Pache
    The founder of popular BlackCrossword.com and author of the groundbreaking Black Crossword returns with a second fabulous collection, featuring 100 diverse-sized puzzles once again inspired by the African diaspora.
  • Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance – A’Lelia Bundles
    A vibrant, deeply researched biography of A’Lelia Walker—daughter of Madam C.J. Walker and herself a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance—written by her great-granddaughter.
  • The Wanderers – Mphuthumi Ntabeni
    Across countries and decades, The Wanderers weaves a captivating tapestry of human lives, exploring the enduring—and sometimes contradictory—duties of blood and country.
  • Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship – Dana A. Williams
    An insightful exploration that unveils the lesser-known dimensions of this legendary writer and her legacy, revealing the cultural icon’s profound impact as a visionary editor who helped define an important period in American publishing and literature.
  • Great Black Hope – Rob Franklin
    A beautifully expansive novel about race and class… a propulsive, glittering story about what it means to exist between worlds, to be upwardly mobile yet spiralling downward and how to find a way back to hope.
  • The Tiny Things Are Heavier – Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo
    A heart-rending debut novel about a Nigerian immigrant as she tries to find her place at home and in America-a powerful epic about love, grief, family, and belonging.
  • King of Ashes – S. A. Crosby
    Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author S. A. Cosby returns with King of Ashes, a Godfather-inspired Southern crime epic and dazzling family drama.
  • A Song of Legends Lost – M. H. Ayinde
    The first book in the series A SONG OF LEGENDS LOST launches a gripping tale of revenge and rebellion in a vividly drawn world inspired by multiple pre-colonial cultures.
  • Paradise Once – Olive Senior
    A historical novel that brings to life the resiliency of the indigenous Taíno people in the Caribbean whose culture was virtually destroyed within two generations of their “discovery” by Christopher Columbus in 1492
  • Trinity – Zelda Lockhart (ebook)
    The Hurston-Wright Award Finalist makes her long-awaited return with this electrifying saga—as moving and indelible as The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, The Turner House, and The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois—*that explores three generations of a family trying to overcome trials and trauma and free themselves from the darkness of the past.
  • The Ghosts of Gwendolyn Montgomery – Clarence A. Haynes
    In a fast-paced, sexy, ghostly adventure, a publicist at the top of her game must confront her secret mystical past. To be a client of Gwendolyn Montgomery—New York’s most powerful publicist, at Sublime Creative—is to be infused with a certain oomph, a mysterious glamour. She seems to have created the ideal life with her handsome new boyfriend, the perfect match. But Gwendolyn has a legion of long-buried secrets that could unravel everything.
  • Family & Other Calamities – Leslie Gray Streeter
    A successful journalist returns to her hometown just as her biggest mistake becomes headline news in this vibrant, funny, and heartfelt novel about facing the past, and its secrets, head-on.
  • Meet Me At The Crossroads – Megan Giddings
    From the award-winning, critically-acclaimed author of Lakewood and The Women Could Fly, a dazzling novel about two brilliant sisters and what happens to their undeniable bond when a mysterious and possibly perilous new world beckons.
  • Sisters – Jonas Hassen Khemiri
    Meet the Mikkola sisters: Ina, Evelyn, and Anastasia. Their mother is a Tunisian carpet seller, their father a mysterious Swede who left them when they were young. Ina is tall, serious, a compulsive organizer. Evelyn is dreamy, magnetic, a smooth talker. And Anastasia is moody, chaotic, a shape-shifting presence, quick to anger…

July

  • Curandera – Irenosen Okojie
    Set between 17th Century Cape Verde, and contemporary London, Curandera is a kaleidoscopic story of rebirth and redemption, and a mythic tale of metamorphic recalibrations across time.
  • The Catch – Yrsa Daley-Ward
    A darkly whimsical debut about women daring to live and create with impunity.
  • Necessary Fiction – Eloghosa Osunde
    An audacious and eye-opening exploration of cross-generational queer life in Nigeria.
  • Black Genius: Essays on an American Legacy – Tre Johnson
    A powerful read redefining the meaning of genius while illuminating the ways in which Black Americans have found various ways to thrive despite insurmountable obstacles.
  • Something in the Water – Phyllis R. Dixon
    Buried secrets, environmental disaster, and a legacy of corruption* hit too close to home when a California native and her family make a fresh start in small-town Texas—and find trouble just beneath the promising surface in this powerful novel for readers of Terry McMillan, Tracy Brown, ReShonda Tate, and Elsie Bryant.
  • The Strangers: Five Extraordinary Black Men and the Worlds That Made Them – Ekow Eshun (ebook)
    A richly imaginative, powerfully empathetic, and intimate portrait of five remarkable Black men that is also a moving meditation on race, estrangement, and the search for home.
  • The Norton Anthology of African American Literature 4th Ed. – Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Valerie Smith, William L. Andrews, Frances Foster, Brent Hayes Edwards, Deborah E. McDowell, Hortense J. Spillers, Kimberly W. Benston, Farah Jasmine Griffin, and Jesse McCarthy
    Two Volume Set. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature brings together an extraordinary array vast in scope and deep in cultural and historical significance. Preeminent scholar and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr., who presided over the book’s creation in the 1990s, continues as general editor, working with a team of highly respected and creative period editors to keep the anthology teachable, up to date, and authoritative.
  • The Trembling Hand – Mathelinda Nabugodi
    A provocative, revelatory history of British Romanticism that examines the impact of the transatlantic slave economy on the lives and times of some of our most beloved poets—with urgent lessons for today.
  • Make Your Way Home – Carrie R. Moore
    In eleven stories that span Florida marshes, North Carolina mountains, and Southern metropolitan cities, Make Your Way Home follows Black men and women who grapple with the homes that have eluded them.

August

  • Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler – Susana M. Morris
    A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.
  • How to Be Unmothered – Camille U. Adams
    Mapping the fault lines between mother and child (humanity’s first and supposedly strongest bond), and with a poet’s homeric vision of her native Trinidad, Camille U. Adams weaves the Caribbean island’s history of colonial violence with her own family’s legacy of abandonment.
  • This Kind of Trouble – Tochi Eze
    A riveting, emotionally-charged debut novel of forbidden love, centred on an estranged couple who are brought together to reckon with the events that tore their family apart decades earlier.
  • Mounted: On Horses, Blackness and Liberation – Bitter Kalli
    Joining the growing Black creative movement currently refashioning horses and cowboy imagery, this thoughtful, probing exploration of the shared history of Blackness and horses reveals what its image can teach us about nationhood, race, and culture.
  • The Second Emancipation – Howard W. French
    The Second Emancipation, a work of Odyssean dimension, recasts the liberation of post–World War II colonial Africa and the American civil rights struggle through the lens of Ghana’s revolutionary visionary Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), who emerges as the most significant African leader of the twentieth century.
  • The Space Cat – Nnedi Okorafor (paperback)
    Between epic battles with squeaky toys and working on ways to improve his ship, Periwinkle is never bored. And when his humans decide to leave the United States and move to the small but bustling town of Kaleria, Nigeria, he’s excited to explore his new home—even after he learns that many Nigerians hate cats. After all, a born adventurer like Periwinkle doesn’t shy away from new experiences. But not everything in Kaleria is as it seems. Soon enough, Periwinkle finds himself on his most out-of-this-world adventure yet, right here on Earth.
  • We Were Not Kings – Robert de la Chevotière
    From island life in the Caribbean to a new beginning in France, a young man comes of age in a sweeping and lyrical novel about family, loss, secrets, and finding freedom from the past.
  • A New New Me – Helen Oyeyemi (ebook)
    Kinga is a woman who is just trying to make it through the week. To move things along, there’s a Kinga for every day: on Mondays, you can catch Kinga A deleting food delivery apps and urging the others to get their stamina up, while Kinga E is happy to spend Fridays soaking, wine-drunk, in the bath until her toes prune.
  • People Like Us – Jason Mott
    In People Like Us, two Black writers are trying to find peace and belonging in a world that is riven with gun violence. One is on a global book tour after a big prize win; the other is set to give a speech at a school that has suffered a shooting. And as their two storylines merge, truths and antics abound in equal measure: characters drink booze out of an award trophy; menaces lurk in the shadows; tiny French cars putter around the countryside; handguns seem to hover in the air; and dreams endure against all odds.
  • The New Negro – Martha H Patterson, Henry Louis Gates Jr
    *This book brings together a wealth of readings on the metaphor of the “New Negro,” charting how generations of thinkers debated its meaning and seized on its potency to stake out an astonishingly broad and sometimes contradictory range of ideological positions. It features dozens of newly unearthed pieces by major figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, and Drusilla Dunjee Houston as well as writings from Cuba, the US Virgin Islands, Dominica, France, Sierra Leone, South Africa, colonial Zimbabwe, and the United States.
  • The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding – Osita Nwanevu
    A bold case for reimagining the American project and making American democracy real—from a formidable new voice in political journalism.
  • Black Moses – Caleb Gayle
    The remarkable story of Edward McCabe, a Black man who tried to establish a Black state within the United States.

September

  • A Wilderness of Mirrors – Olufemi Terry
    Olufemi Terry’s remarkable debut explores the effects of colonialism, social atomization and the rootlessness of affluence.
  • The Nga’phandileh Whisperer: A Sauútiverse Novella – Eugen Bacon
    When a precocious Guardian in Sector Z in New Inku’lulu—an elite space outpost—misuses her sound magic, the Guardians punish her by stripping away her magical ability. A science fiction horror from an award-winning queen of Afro-Irreal genre bending.
  • The New Book: Poems, Letters, Blurbs and Things – Nikki Giovanni (ebook)
    Nikki Giovanni’s extraordinary new collection—a landmark of American literature—speaks to the fury of our current political moment while reflecting on the tragedies and triumphs of her early life. With this collection, which includes brief letters and short prose from her life as well as poetry, Giovanni reaffirms her place as a giant of literature, a canny truth-teller, an indispensable radical orator, and one of America’s preeminent cultural critics.
  • Putting Myself Together – Jamaica Kincaid
    A landmark collection of essays and articles by iconic writer Jamaica Kincaid, brought together for the first time.
  • The New Eve – Moussa Ould Ebnou
    Translated from French and Arabic, The New Eve is an exploration of love, identity, and resistance in a society where emotional connections are seen as a disease. In a future where human reproduction is controlled by technology and gender roles are policed by a totalitarian society, Adam and Maneki forge a forbidden connection that transcends their world’ s rigid structures.
  • Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America – Greg Tate (paperback)
    A reissue of Greg Tate’s classic, out-of-print collection of essays, with a new introduction by Hanif Abdurraqib and a new foreword by Questlove.
  • The Cartographer of Absences – Mia Couto
    A haunting novel of historical witness about a father and son in the waning days of colonial Mozambique by the winner of the 2025 PEN/Nabokov Award. Diogo Santiago is a celebrated Mozambican poet and intellectual, a well-known professor at the university in his country’s capital. In 2019, on the eve of a cyclone that will devastate the East African coast, he returns to his hometown of Beira to receive a tribute from his fellow citizens. As Cyclone Idai approaches Beira, threatening to wipe away the physical traces of the world in which he grew up, Diogo is forced to confront the impermanence of his own memories, too.
  • Cécé – Emmelie Prophète, Aidan Rooney
    Cécé La Flamme, as she’s known by her loyal Facebook friends, captures photographs of still bodies. Figures scorched and bruised, left to the rubble of the Cité of Divine Power. When she posts an image of a corpse, Cécé’s followers skyrocket. “Nothing got more attention than a good corpse that was nice and warm or already rotting.” Just beside visions of rot and neglect, she posts pictures of her toes, gullies crisscrossing the cité, and her own lips painted blue. With every image, Cécé seeks control and wants to create a frank, intimate record of the terror in her cité.
  • Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture – Roxane Gay (ed)
    Cultural critic and bestselling author Roxane Gay has edited a collection of essays that explore what it means to live in a world where women are frequently belittled and harassed due to their gender, and offers a call to arms insisting that “not that bad” must no longer be good enough.
  • It Was The Way She Said It: Short Stories, Essays, and Wisdom – Terry McMillan
    From #1 New York Times bestselling author Terry McMillan, a collection of short fiction and essays about love, aging, popular culture and all the things in between, spanning more than forty years of her remarkable career.
  • Gray Dawn – Walter Mosley
    Detective Easy Rawlins has settled into the happy rhythm of his new life when a dark siren from his past returns and threatens to destroy the peace he’s fought for, in the latest installment from “master of craft and narrative” Walter Mosley in a legendary series (National Book Foundation).
  • The Waterbearers – Sasha Bonét
    A sweeping narrative of the unique beauty and trials of Black matriarchy in America that weaves a sharp, tender examination of three single Black mothers—the author’s grandmother, mother, and the author herself—with stories of influential Black women in our culture.
  • Surviving Paris – Robin Allison Davis
    A deeply personal account of a young Black woman who set out to shake up her life by moving abroad but got a lot more than she bargained for.
  • Who’s All Going (to Die)? – Lisa Springer
    One can never ask too many questions in this contemporary horror about a teen girl who gets invited to the soft launch of a luxury resort and finds their wellness practices disturbing–and deadly.
  • The Wilderness – Angela Flournoy
    An era-defining novel about five Black women over the course of their twenty-year friendship, as they move through the dizzying and sometimes precarious period between young adulthood and midlife–in the much-anticipated second book from National Book Award finalist Angela Flournoy.
  • Mothership Connected – Seth Neblett
    An oral history with the women of Parliament-Funkadelic, from forming the band to landing the mothership.

October

  • The Natural Order of Things – Donika Kelly
    In poems inventive, playful, and formally nimble, Kelly pays homage to the voices and people she comes from, the songs of her lineage. Other poems follow the early stirrings of love to erotic transcendence with the lover and the self. Throughout, Kelly finds mirror and marvel in nature, art, and precious friendships.
  • Octavia E Butler: Lilith’s Brood The Xenogenesis Trilogy (LOA 393) – Octavia E Butler
    For the first time in a deluxe, hardcover collector’s edition, the landmark post-apocalyptic trilogy from the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning author of Kindred, the Parable novels, and “Bloodchild” From the Hugo, Locus, and Nebula Award-winning author of Kindred, the Parable novels, and “Bloodchild,” here in its spellbinding entirety is Octavia E. Butler’s epic of human survival and transformation.
  • Racebook – Tochi Onyebuchi
    From the author of Hugo and NAACP Image Award finalist Riot Baby, an original memoir in essays that interrogates how identities are shaped and informed in online spaces and how the relationship between race and the Internet has changed in his three decades online.
  • Tall Is Her Body – Robert de la Chevotière
    A sweeping, multicultural family story of keen observation and the supernatural in which one man’s journey to wholeness against the collapse of the West Indies’ banana industry during the 1990s reflects the lasting impacts of colonialism, Catholicism, and immigration.
  • The Leaving Room – Amber McBride
    Gospel is the Keeper of the Leaving Room—a place all young people must phase through when they die. … When a random door opens and a Keeper named Melody arrives, their souls become entangled. Gospel seriousness melts and Melody’s fear of connection fades, but still—are Keepers allowed to fall in love? Now they must find a way out of the Leaving Room and be unafraid of their love. They must claw their way back to their bodies because there is so much more life to explore—together.
  • Fela: Music is the Weapon – Jibola Fagbamiye, Conor McCreery
    A spectacular graphic novel about the life and times of the legendary Fela Kuti—the Pan-African frontman, multi-instrumentalist, sociopolitical powerhouse, and father of Afrobeat.
  • Tenderheaded – Michaela angela Davis
    The compelling memoir that explores race, cultural representation, Black media’s legacy, privilege, and identity from VIBE’s founding fashion editor and CNN correspondent Michaela Angela Davis.
  • Minor Black Figures – Brandon Taylor
    From the Booker Prize finalist and bestselling author: a perceptive novel about a gay Black painter navigating the worlds of art, desire, and creativity.
  • Dead and Alive – Zadie Smith
    This eagerly awaited new collection brings Smith’s dexterity as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. Organized in five thematic sections—eyeballing, considering, reconsidering, mourning, and confessing—she unspools intimate dialogues with various sources of inspiration.
  • As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Fiction – Terese Mason Pierre (ed)
    A ground-breaking anthology of haunting speculative stories by contemporary Black Canadian writers that explore growth, futurity, and joy.

November

  • The Ganymedan – R.T Ester
    A dark science fiction debut examining agency and sacrifice through one man’s desperate attempt to reach home after he murders his tyrannical employer.
  • Black-Owned: The Revolutionary Life of the Black Bookstore – by Char Adams
    NBC News reporter Char Adams writes a deeply compelling and rigorously reported history of Black political movements, told through the lens of Black-owned bookstores, which have been centers for organizing from abolition to the Civil Rights Movement to Black Lives Matter.
  • Queen Mother – Ashley D Farmer
    From an award-winning historian of radical Black politics comes the definitive biography of Queen Mother Audley Moore—foremother of the Black Nationalism movement and trailblazer in the fight for reparations.
  • Palaver – Bryan Washington
    A life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington.
  • Shade is a place – MaKshya Tolbert
    From National Poetry Series winner MaKshya Tolbert, a lyrical debut that explores the social and ecological relief trees can provide within the entanglements of place, property, urban planning, and racial terror in Charlottesville, Virginia.
  • Coltrane – Ravi Coltrane
    The definitive photographic celebration of John Coltrane’s life and music, featuring exclusive contributions written by Ravi Coltrane, Wayne Coyne, Dev Hynes, Phil Lesh, Julie Mehretu, Carlos Santana, and Patti Smith.
  • Afrofuturism Short Stories – Flame Tree Studio (Literature and Science)
    This new book offers new stories from open submissions and by invitation, on all aspects of speculative fiction.
  • Cursed Daughters – Oyinkan Braithwaite
    Cursed Daughters is a brilliant cocktail of modernity and superstition, vibrant humor and hard-won wisdom, romantic love and familial obligation. With it’s unforgettable cast of characters, it asks us what it means to be given a second chance and how to live both wisely and well with what we’ve been given.

December

  • The Catacombs – William Demby
    A gripping and genre-defying novel by a rediscovered great of twentieth-century Black American writing, about what it means to be a writer at the dawn of a new era First published in 1965, The Catacombs is a metafictional account set in early 1960s Rome, where the author had returned to study art history after serving on the Italian front during World War II.
  • The Race Track – Kimberlé Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, George Lipsitz
    The Race Track dispenses with the myth of post-racial America, explaining not only why race matters more than ever but also how we can fashion 21st-century solutions to combating racial injustice.

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