Black History Month Picks for AdultsUnpublished

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The New Yorker, Best Books of 2022 Vanity Fair, Best Books of 2022 Booklist, Best Books of 2022 Singer. Actress. Beauty. Spy. During WWII, Josephine Baker, the world's richest and most glamorous entertainer, was an Allied spy in Occupied France...

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...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * USA Today Bestseller * Washington Post's The Twelve Best Thrillers of the Year * TIME's 100 Must Read Books of the Year * Goodreads Choice Award Nominee * USA Today's Best Reviewed Books of the Year * BookPage's Best...

The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. "Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work." --Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again "Engaging. . . . In Gates's telling, the Black church shines bright...

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR

A TIME BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR * The first major biography of one of our most influential judges--an activist lawyer who became the first Black woman appointed to the federal judiciary--that provides an eye-opening account of the twin struggles for gender equality and civil rights in the...

From the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Such A Fun Age comes a fresh and provocative story about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students. It's 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins,...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author of Harlem Shuffle continues his Harlem saga in a powerful and hugely-entertaining novel that summons 1970s New York in all its seedy glory. A Best Book of the Year: The New...

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--all living siblings of the Malcolm Little family, classmates, street friends, cellmates, Nation of Islam...

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss. Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has...

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 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 definitive history of World War II from the African American perspective, written by civil rights expert and Dartmouth history professor Matthew Delmont. Over one million Black men and women served in World War II. Black troops were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and the Battle of the Bulge, serving in...

From James McBride, author of the bestselling Oprah's Book Club pick Deacon King Kong and the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, a novel about small-town secrets and the people who keep them In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging...

WINNER OF THE 2023 PULITZER PRIZE IN NONFICTION WINNER OF THE DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE; FINALIST FOR THE J. ANTHONY LUKAS PRIZE; A BCALA 2023 HONOR NONFICTION AWARD WINNER. A landmark...

1950s Philadelphia: fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that...

" With echoes of Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author's struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father's strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as...

Spanning over decades, this is the remarkable, heartfelt memoir from Abdul 'Duke' Fakir, the last surviving member of The Four Tops. Amidst a backdrop of Detroit, I'll Be There features revealing anecdotes from the group's formation, their early days as backup singers for the...

The fates of two unforgettable women--one just beginning a journey of reckoning and self-discovery and the other completing her life's last vital act--intertwine in this sweeping, powerful novel set at the terminus of the Underground Railroad. In the 1800s in Dunmore,...

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...

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...

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...

"Musical in structure--the octaves rise when the music calls for it; truths are revealed by the invisible beats of this gorgeous, rich story" -Ann Napolitano, New York Times bestselling author of Hello Beautiful (Oprah's Book Club Pick) "Riveting, rhythmic, transcendent...

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...

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...

In this sexy modern-day fairytale from the New York Times bestselling author of Seven Days in June, a free-spirited florist and an enigmatic musician share a soul mate connection told through the history, art, and the magic of Harlem. A ...

" 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...

Winner of the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Biography "A rich narrative of the Crafts, an enslaved couple who escaped from Georgia in 1848, with light-skinned Ellen disguised as a disabled white gentleman and William as her manservant, exploiting assumptions about race, class, and...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER * READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY * A spellbinding debut novel tracing three generations of a Southern Black family and one daughter's discovery that she has the power to change her family's legacy. "A rhapsodic hymn to...

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...

" 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...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER . A lyrical culinary journey that explores the hidden legacy of Black Appalachians, throughpowerful storytelling alongside nearly forty comforting recipes, from the former poetlaureate of Kentucky."With Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts,...

As seen on The TODAY Show! Bestselling author ReShonda Tate presents a fascinating fictional portrait of Hattie McDaniel, one of Hollywood's most prolific but woefully underappreciated stars--and the first Black person ever to win an Oscar for her role as Mammy in the...

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...

A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephens Jr. 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. Gracetown, Florida

A GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK * This beautiful, page-turning and redemptive story of a mother's gripping journey across the Caribbean to find her stolen children and piece her family back together is a "celebration of motherhood and female resilience" (The Observer). ...

A gripping and thrilling novel of the courageous Black women who made history in World War Two. Inspired by true events, and perfect for fans of Kate Quinn's The Alice Network and Hidden Figures. 'Poignant and...

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....

"Deeply empathetic yet unflinching in its gaze... an unforgettable exploration of responsibility and redemption, the dangers of good intentions, and the folly of believing anyone can decide what's best for another's life."--Celeste Ng Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a...

***LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL*** ***A GUARDIAN GRAPHIC NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2023*** Darrin Bell was six years old when his mother told him he couldn't have a realistic water gun. She said that police think little Black boys older and less innocent than they are. So...

A searing and tender novel about a young Black journalist's search for answers in the unsolved murder of her great-grandfather in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, decades ago--inspired by the author's own family history Birmingham, 1929: Robert Lee Harrington, a master carpenter,...

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK * A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR *  From the best-selling author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, a searing multi-generational novel--set in the 1980s in racially and politically turbulent Philadelphia and in the tiny town of Bonaparte, Alabama--about...

The remarkable and inspiring story of William Still, an unknown abolitionist who dedicated his life to managing a critical section of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia--the free state directly north of the Mason-Dixon Line--helping hundreds of people escape from slavery. ...

An NAACP Image Award Nominee Longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize A Marie Claire Book Club pick Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by *Marie Claire* *Teen Vogue* *Buzzfeed* *Essence* *Ms. Magazine* *NBCNews.com* *...

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...

  "What a beautifully imagined and important narrative. Sanders' clear-eyed and powerful writing made this a hard one to stop reading!" --Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-Winning Author "This is a novel to cherish and share. And this is a...