YA, immigration

My Darling from the Lions is a remarkable debut collection with plenty to say and the ability to say it in a unique, witty, and fresh manner.

YA, immigration

Veronica Chambers offers a peek into the story of rich Mexican immigrants and how they find out that, moneyed or not, they cannot shed the stain of their origins.

travel, non-fiction

Nanjala Nyabola offers an insightful look into how travel intersects with topics like migration, identity and the freedom to move.

self-help, finance

As a 23-year-old woman from a black single-parent household, Black Girl Finance finally made me feel seen.

short stories, literary

My Monticello pulsates the contemporary moment’s terror and uncertainty. Who and what are we the product of, and what is the future of this current birthing?

self-help

This is a true ode of love to Black girlhood. You may laugh, you may tear up a little, and you just might remember lessons from your younger self.

non-fiction, self-help

As a trauma-informed therapist, it is wonderful to see the work I do affirmed by another Black woman.

non-fiction, coming-of-age

Habiba Cooper Diallo wrote much of #BlackInSchool during her final two years of high school in Canada.

historical

After publishing to great acclaim in the 1980s and 1990s, Gayl Jones disappeared from the public eye.

verse novel, literary

Home is Not a Country, by award-winning poet Safia Elhillo, is a captivating novel-in-verse about identity and belonging in post-9/11 America.

literary, epic

A modern take on the origin story of Kenya’s Gĩkũyũ people, The Perfect Nine is one of those rare books about history that has, itself, made history.

historical, crime

The Fortune Men is a historical fiction set in 1950s Cardiff that explores the real and distressing story of Mahmood Mattan, the last man to be hanged in Wales.

legal thriller, debut

While Justice Sleeps follows Avery, a law clerk who’s just been made power of attorney over the Supreme Court judge she serves.

domestic thriller

We are asphyxiated in the protagonist’s psyche as forcefully as Black residents are being plucked out of Gifford Place.

crime, short stories

Edited by Maaza Mengiste, this Akashic Books anthology which is being reissued by Cassava Republic Press this summer comprises the work of some of Ethiopia’s most talented writers.

legal thriller, debut

In the late 1990s, a young musician is found murdered in her Los Angeles apartment and her ex-boyfriend is arrested on suspicion of murder.

literary, mystery

Following The Spider King’s Daughter and Welcome to Lagos, Sankofa marks a departure from Lagosian life and tells the story of a mixed race middle-aged woman.

historical, mystery

Despite the glitz, glamour and Gatsby-like parties that we know the 1920s for, Dead Dead Girls presents a darker side of the Roaring Twenties era.

coming-of-age, literary

Longlisted for the Man Booker International, Alain Mabanckou’s Black Moses zeroes in on corruption in late 1970s Congo-Brazzaville.

coming-of-age, queer

As always, Akwaeke Emezi highlights the fallibility of social perception and the limits of what we think we know.

historical, verse novel

The Emperor’s Babe is an irreverent and salacious romp that merges together tradition and contemporaneity in a startlingly unique way.

romance, coming-of-age

This astonishing debut is a tender portrait of diasporic community showcasing the resilience of love across time and space.

memoir, coming-of-age

Musa Okwonga unveils the multiple faces of British racism and traces how they are intricately linked in a system rigged for Eton’s white, upper-class graduates.

memoir, travel

Any discussion of Afropean should begin by acknowledging that it is pioneering, and certainly so within the Anglophone literary tradition.

memoir, queer

Many know Selenis Leyva from Orange Is the New Black where she plays inmate Gloria Mendoza. Fewer know that she and her sister, Marizol, co-authored a powerful memoir.

historical, coming-of-age

Libertie is a novel of ideas that grapples with the meaning of freedom in a violently anti-Black and colorist world.

historical fiction, debut

What sells many on Homegoing is how Yaa Gyasi insists upon something, palpable and yet elusive, that the ugly circumstances of history cannot lay claim to.

historical fiction, debut

A finalist for the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa’s debut is a pioneering example of recent trends in Black historical fiction.

historical romance

A girl of few words who has no patience for the classroom, Emoni’s talent is in the kitchen where she makes magic with everything she touches.

YA, literary

What makes this historical romance necessary is its willingness to disarm the legitimacy of any politics that attempts to exist without empathy.

YA, romance

Pride is a deeply representative retelling that foregrounds Black people’s right to exist in a canon that has always pretended they do not.