Black History Month Picks for Adults

Updated January 31, 2024
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All that she carried : the journey of Ashley's sack, a black family keepsake
Miles, Tiya
Paper Book
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a "deeply layered and insightful" (The Washington Post) testament to people who are left out...
All the sinners bleed
Cosby, S. A.
Paper Book
***GUARDIAN BEST CRIME AND THRILLERS OF 2023*** THE TIMES - THRILLER OF THE MONTH*** *** MAIL ON SUNDAY - BEST NEW FICTION*** FINANCIAL TIMES - BEST NEW CRIME BOOKS*** 'A crackling good police procedural....fresh and exhilarating'...
Black AF history : the un-whitewashed story of America
Harriot, Michael
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NAACP IMAGE AWARD NOMINEE * AMAZON'S TOP 20 HISTORY BOOKS OF 2023 * B&N BEST OF EDUCATIONAL HISTORY * THE ROOT'S BEST BOOKS OF 2023 * CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023 From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly...
Chain-Gang All-Stars
Adjei-Brenyah, Nana Kwame
Paper Book
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR
Come and get it
Reid, Kiley
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER National Bestseller A Good Morning America Book Club Pick An Indie Next Pick A LibraryReads Pick Acclaimed author Kiley Reid's fresh and provocative story about desire, consumption, and bad behavior.
Crook manifesto a novel
Whitehead, Colson
Paper Book
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winning Colson Whitehead continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory. It's 1971. Trash piles up on the streets, crime is at an all-time high, the city is careening towards...
The dead are arising : the life of Malcolm X
Payne, Les
Paper Book
Les Payne, the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, embarked in 1990 on a nearly thirty-year-long quest to interview anyone he could find who had actually known Malcolm X - including siblings, classmates, friends, cellmates, FBI moles and cops, and political leaders around the...
Family meal : a novel
Washington, Bryan
Paper Book
"Achingly and beautifully etched. . . Washington is a generous and gentle writer, with a profound capacity to face the cruelty and pain of contemporary American life while simultaneously offering his characters--and readers--an expansive space for self-forgiveness, hope, and nourishment."<...
Finding me
Davis, Viola
Paper Book
OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * A HARPERS BAZAAR BEST BOOK OF 2022 * A PARADE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK * A MARIE CLAIRE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK "It's clear from the first page that Davis is going to serve a more intimate, unpolished account than is typical of the average (often ghost-written)...
The fraud
Smith, Zadie
Paper Book
The New York Times bestseller * One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year * One of NPR's Best Books of the Year * Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly and BookPage * One of Oprah Daily's Best Novels of 2023 "[A] brilliant...
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
McBride, James
Paper Book
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the...
His name is George Floyd : one man's life and the struggle for racial justice
Samuels, Robert
Paper Book
The murder of George Floyd sparked a fiery summer of activism and unrest all over the world in 2020. People marched under the Black Lives Matter banner, demanding an end to racial injustice. The movement has led many to redouble their efforts, and government officials to examine the causes of...
The house of Eve : a novel
Johnson, Sadeqa
Paper Book
"Amazing...I was completely surprised by the ending of this beautifully told and written book." --Reese Witherspoon "A triumph of historical fiction" (The Washington Post), an instant New York Times bestseller, and a Reese's Book Club pick, set in 1950s...
How to say Babylon : a memoir
Sinclair, Safiya
Paper Book
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner A New York Times Notable Book A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! A Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, Vulture, Shelf Awareness<...
In the upper country
Thomas, Kai
Paper Book
WINNER OF THE ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE 2023 SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 AMAZON CANADA FIRST NOVEL AWARD COSMOPOLITAN'S 10 BEST HISTORICAL FICTION BOOKS OF 2023 'Fresh and propulsive . . . a veneration of those whose tales are...
King : a life
Eig, Jonathan
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER *SELECTED AS ONE OF  BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2023* Vividly written and exhaustively researched, Jonathan Eig's King is the first major biography in decades of the civil rights...
The late Americans
Taylor, Brandon
Paper Book
INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE, ELLE, OPRAH DAILY, THE WASHINGTON POST, BUZZFEED AND VULTURE "Erudite, intimate, hilarious, poignant . . . A gorgeously written novel of youth's promise, of...
Let us descend a novel
Ward, Jesmyn
Paper Book
From Jesmyn Ward--the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow--comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War. "'Let...
The list
Adegoke, Yomi
Paper Book
The instant Top 5 Sunday Times bestseller 'The Book Of The Summer' VOGUE 'A page-turning read about the dark side of social media' STYLIST 'Topical, heartfelt, provocative' BERNARDINE EVARISTO 'Impossible to put down' PAULA HAWKINS 'A page-turner...
Lone women : a novel
LaValle, Victor
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * Blue skies, empty land--and enough wide-open space to hide a horrifying secret. A woman with a past, a mysterious trunk, a town on the edge of nowhere, and an "absorbing, powerful" (BuzzFeed) new vision of the American West, from the award-winning author of...
A Love Song for Ricki Wilde
Williams, Tia.
Paper Book
The new enchanting romance from the author of Seven Days in June and The Perfect FindOne florist. One pianist. One love story . . . One hundred years in the making.Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn't one of them. As the impulsive, artistic daughter of a...
Maame
George, Jessica
Paper Book
" Maame (ma-meh) has many meanings in Twi but in my case, it means woman. It's fair to say that Maddie's life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still somehow manages to be overbearing), Maddie...
Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
Woo, Ilyon.
Paper Book
A New York Times bestseller, the incredible true story of a couple that escaped slavery in the South and eventually made their way to the UK, Africa and beyond.
Memphis : a novel
Stringfellow, Tara M.
Paper Book
'Tara Stringfellow will be an author to watch for years to come . . . A stellar debut' Jacqueline Woodson, bestselling author of Red at the BoneJoan can't change her family's past.But she can create her future.Joan was only a child the last time she visited Memphis. She...
Nightcrawling
Mottley, Leila
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER * AN OPRAH BOOK CLUB PICK * A dazzling novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system. This debut of a blazingly original voice "bursts at the seams of every page and...
One blood
Millner, Denene
Paper Book
" Join New York Times bestselling author Denene Millner as she explores the lives of three generations of women tied together by love, hope, dreams, ambition...and family secrets in this epic novel. Meet Grace: raised by her beloved grandmother in tension...
Rebecca, not Becky : a novel
Platt, Christine A.
Paper Book
In the vein of Such a Fun Age, a whip-smart, compulsively readable novel about two upper-class stay-at-home mothers--one white, one Black--living in a "perfect" suburb that explores motherhood, friendship, and the true meaning of sisterhood amidst the backdrop of America's all-too-familiar racial...
The reformatory
Due, Tananarive
Paper Book
A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephen Jones as he's sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead.
River sing me home
Shearer, Eleanor
Paper Book
" Rare. Moving. Powerful. This beautiful, page-turning and redemptive story of a mother's gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children in the aftermath of slavery is a remarkable debut. Her search begins with an ending...<...
Symphony of secrets
Slocumb, Brendan
Paper Book
A gripping page-turner from the celebrated author of book club favorite The Violin Conspiracy: Music professor Bern Hendricks discovers a shocking secret about the most famous American composer of all time--his music may have been stolen from a Black Jazz Age prodigy named Josephine Reed....
Take my hand
Perkins-Valdez, Dolen
Paper Book
'Shot through with spirit and hope, it's one hell of a book' Stylist, Books You Can't Miss in 2022A nurse at the Family Planning Clinic in Montgomery Alabama, Civil Townsend is passionate about putting choice into women's hands. She brings the option of birth control to their doorsteps...
Time's undoing a novel
Head, Cheryl A.
Paper Book
When crack was king : a people's history of a misunderstood era
Ramsey, Donovan X.
Paper Book
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD * A "vivid and frank" (NPR) account of the crack cocaine era and a community's ultimate resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the dramatic rise and fall of the epidemic   "A master class in disrupting a...
You were always mine
Pride, Christine
Paper Book

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