Best African American Fiction Literature
Discover the best African American fiction literature with our curated list of must-read books. Explore powerful stories, acclaimed authors, and timeless classics in Black literature.
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Sugar
by Bernice L. McFadden
Set in a small Arkansas town in the 1950s, this tale of loyalty and friendship between two African-American women finds Jude turning to the church after the death of her daughter, and to a young woman who turns out to be a prostitute. A first novel. Reprint.
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Blacker the Berry...
by Wallace Thurman
This widely read, controversial work from the Harlem Renaissance was the first novel to openly explore prejudice within the black community. A young woman, whose dark complexion is a source of sorrow and humiliation not only to herself but to her lighter-skinned family and friends, travels from Boise, Idaho, to New York's Harlem, hoping to find a safe haven in the Black Mecca of the 1920s.
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Mama
by Terry McMillan
The explosive novel that introduced the world to #1 New York Times bestselling author Terry McMillan. Mildred Peacock is the tough, funny, feisty heroine of Mama, a survivor who’ll do anything to keep her family together. In Mildred’s world, men come and go as quickly as her paychecks, but her five children are her dream, her hope, and her future. Not since Alice Walker’s The Color Purple has a black woman’s story been portrayed with such rich power, honesty, and love.
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The Upper Room
by Mary Monroe
Mama Ruby's known for taking things that aren't rightfully hers, like her best friend's stillborn infant, who she brought back to life and christened Maureen. She's also rumoured to have done away with her husband. Some fear her, others try their best to avoid her. But Mama Ruby doesn't pay them any mind. Not when she's got the one gift God gave her - her precious baby girl. But growing up with a mother like Ruby is enough to make any half-sane girl wish for something else. And when Maureen gets the chance to explore the real world, you can bet she's going to take it...
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Lil Mama's Rules
by Sheneska Jackson
Madison Maguire is a modern-day heroine who appears to have it all. She's feisty, gorgeous, smart, and savvy -- a single woman playing the field and loving it. She sticks to the rules of dating she's learned through life's tough breaks as she fends off two-bit actors, old flames, and a determined secret admirer. The game changes, however, when Mr. Right appears on the scene. But just as Madison is about to follow her heart, her life turns upside down, forcing her to learn a whole new set of rules about love, loss, and trust.
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Destiny's Daughters
by Donna Hill
Separated at birth, three sisters--Leticia, a former call girl; Jamilla, a successful author, and Clarissa, a jazz singer--finally cross paths in adulthood, in this powerful collection of interconnected stories. Original.
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Nowhere is a Place
by Bernice L. McFadden
Traveling across country together, a mother and daughter discover the assorted pieces of their family's past, which--when pulled together--reveal a history of amazing survival and abundant joy.
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This Bitter Earth
by Bernice L. McFadden
Sugar Lacey returns to her childhood home in Short Junction, Arkansas, where she confronts love, hatred, and black magic, which leads her to St. Louis where an old friendship puts her courage and compassion to the test.
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Your Blues Ain't Like Mine
by Bebe Moore Campbell
"ABSORBING...COMPELLING...HIGHLY SATISFYING." --San Francisco Chronicle "TRULY ENGAGING...Campbell has a storyteller's ear for dialogue and the visual sense of painting a picture and a place....There's a steam that keeps the story moving as the characters, and later their children, wrestle through racial, personal and cultural crisis." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "REMARKABLE...POWERFUL." --Time "YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE is rich, lush fiction set in rural Mississippi beginning in the mid-'50s. It is also a haunting reality flowing through Anywhere, U.S.A., in the '90s....There's love, rage and hatred, winning and losing, honor, abuse; in other words, humanity....Campbell now deserves recognition as the best of storytellers. Her writing sings." --The Indianapolis News "EXTRAORDINDARY." --The Seattle Times "A COMPELLING NARRATIVE...Campbell is a master when it comes to telling a story." --Entertainment Weekly YOUR BLUES AIN'T LIKE MINE won the NAACP Image Award for Best Literary Work of Fiction
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Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime
by J. California Cooper
Whether through her stories or her legendary readings, J. California Cooper has an uncanny ability to reach out to readers like an old and dear friend. Her characters are plain-spoken and direct: simple people for whom life, despite its ever-present struggles, is always worth the journey. In Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime, Cooper's characteristic themes of romance, heartbreak, struggle and faith resonate. We meet Darlin, a self-proclaimed femme fatale who uses her wiles to try to find a husband; MLee, whose life seems to be coming to an end at the age of forty until she decides to set out and see if she can make a new life for herself; Kissy and Buddy, both trying and failing to find them until they finally meet each other; and Aberdeen, whose daughter Uniqua shows her how to educate herself and move up in the world. These characters and others offer inspiration, laughter, instruction and pure enjoyment in what is one of J. California Cooper's finest story collections.
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Tumbling
by Diane Mckinney-whetstone
A beautiful and uplifting debut from one of the,most exciting voices in new black fiction.,.
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Blessings
by Sheneska Jackson
Four women--Patricia, Zuma, Faye, and Sandy--search for happiness in their daily lives as they struggle with such difficult issues as adoption, infertility, abortion, child discipline, and female bonding.
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Mama Day
by Gloria Naylor
A powerful generational saga at once tender and suspenseful, overflowing with magic and common sense, this book "resonates with genuine excitement … a big, strong, admirable novel” (New York Times Book Review). On the island of Willow Springs, off the Georgia coast, the powers of healer Mama Day are tested by her great niece, Cocoa, a stubbornly emancipated woman endangered by the island's darker forces.
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My Soul to Keep
by Tananarive Due
When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent, mysterious deaths, David makes an unimaginable confession: More than 400 years ago, he and other members of an Ethiopian sect traded their humanity so they would never die, a secret he must protect at any cost. Now, his immortal brethren have decided David must return and leave his family in Miami. Instead, David vows to invoke a forbidden ritual to keep Jessica and his daughter with him forever. Harrowing, engrossing and skillfully rendered, My Soul to Keep traps Jessica between the desperation of immortals who want to rob her of her life and a husband who wants to rob her of her soul. With deft plotting and an unforgettable climax, this tour de force reminiscent of early Anne Rice will win Due a new legion of fans.
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Big Girls Don't Cry
by Connie Briscoe
After Naomi Jefferson's brother is killed in an automobile accident on the way to a civil rights demonstration and the man she loves betrays her, Naomi struggles to find meaning in life through politics and her career.
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The Piano Lesson
by August Wilson
A powerful exploration of the legacy of slavery in America, The Piano Lesson centres on a brother and sister in 1930s Pittsburgh as they argue over whether to sell the family piano, an instrument tainted by the wages of slavery. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1990. The play is part of August Wilson's Century Cycle, his epic dramatisation of the African American experience in the twentieth century. This edition includes a Foreword by Toni Morrison. 'It was in reading The Piano Lesson that I was struck by the beauty and accuracy of August Wilson's language, as well as a richness waiting to be mined' Toni Morrison, from her Foreword
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Baby of the Family
by Tina McElroy Ansa
Lena, once a charmed little girl with psychic powers, becomes more haunted as she grows older. She has her family's love, but knows she has to make her own uncertain way.
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Miss Ophelia
by Mary Burnett Smith
Part coming-of-age story and part slice of life, this is a literary novel about African-Americans in the rural South. Set in rural Virginia during 1948, Miss Ophelia is a remarkable debut novel that explores the issues of abortion, illegitimacy, adultery, and skin color. Belly Anderson now in the autumn of her life, reminisces about the last summer of her childhood. A strong-willed and free-spirited eleven-year-old, she reluctantly leaves her home in rural Pharaoh and goes to Jamison to help her mean Aunt Rachel recover from surgery. Belly has two reasons for deciding to go to Jamison: She's left alone when her only friend becomes pregnant and is sent away, and she hopes that she'll be allowed to take piano lessons from her mother's childhood friend. While taking lessons from Miss Ophelia, she learns a terrible secret about her beloved teacher--a secret that forces Belly to grow up and learn what it really means to be an adult.
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Push
by Sapphire
"Push: Based on the Novel by Sapphire," directed by Lee Daniels and written by Damien Paul GRAND JURY PRIZE and AUDIENCE AWARD winner at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival Relentless, remorseless, and inspirational, this "horrific, hope-filled story" (Newsday) is certain to haunt a generation of readers. Precious Jones, 16 years old and pregnant by her father with her second child, meets a determined and highly radical teacher who takes her on a journey of transformation and redemption.
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The Color of Love
by Sandra Kitt
Considered by many to be the foremost African American writer of romance, Kitt presents a sizzling romance that compares to The Bodyguard. Leah Downey is a talented black artist dealing with a loveless relationship. Jason Horn is a white cop trying to get over the traumas of his past. When they meet, sparks fly--but can they keep it together?