African American Historical Fiction

Danielle Evans is widely acclaimed for her blisteringly smart voice and X-ray insights into complex human relationships. With The Office of Historical Corrections, Evans zooms in on particular moments and relationships in her characters’ lives in a way that allows them to speak to larger issues of race, culture, and history. She introduces us to Black and multiracial characters who are experiencing the universal confusions of lust and love, and getting walloped by grief - all while exploring how history haunts us, personally and collectively.

Award-winning author Denny S. Bryce and USA Today bestselling author Eliza Knight collaborate on a brilliant novel that uncovers the boundary-breaking, genuine friendship between Ella Fitzgerald, the Queen of Jazz, and iconic movie star Marilyn Monroe.

"The Heroic Slave" is the only work of fiction by the eminent abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The narrative was inspired by Madison Washington, a slave on the Creole who led a rebellion on the ship in November 1841, and had it sail to Nassau in the Bahamas instead of New Orleans. The short story appeared in the collection Autographs for Freedom (1852).

Running into a long-ago friend sets memories from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything - until it wasn't. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant - a part of a future that belonged to them.

June 1957. One hot afternoon in the backwaters of the Deep South, a young black farmer named Tucker Caliban salts his fields, shoots his horse, burns his house, and heads north with his wife and child. His departure sets off an exodus of the state’s entire black population, throwing the established order into brilliant disarray. Told from the points of view of the white residents who remained, A Different Drummer stands, decades after its first publication in 1962, as an extraordinary and prescient triumph of satire and spirit.

In November 1960, all of America watched as a tiny six-year-old black girl, surrounded by federal marshals, walked through a mob of screaming segregationists and into her school. An icon of the civil rights movement, Ruby Bridges chronicles each dramatic step of this pivotal event in history through her own words.

Easy Rawlins, L.A.'s most reluctant detective, comes home one day to find Easter, the daughter of his friend, Christmas Black, left on his doorstep. Easy knows that this could only mean that ex-marine Black is probably dead, or will be soon. But Easter's appearance is only the beginning, as Easy is immersed in a sea of problems.

A marriage of convenience saved Lady Abigail Worthing's family from disgrace, but she's finding her absent husband's endless conditions increasingly repressive. Unable to stay at their London home during the oncoming winter, she accepts a ride to the country from her neighbor, Stapleton Henderson. However, she's less than delighted that she's his excuse to avoid a dinner held by Lord Charles Duncan, one of London's most powerful—and relentless—magistrates.

Daniel is aggravated by the headstrong and much too observant new detective he's paired with, and Janeta is intrigued by the broken but honorable man she is tasked with betraying. As they embark on a mission to intercept Jefferson Davis and thwart European meddling, their dual hidden agendas are threatened by the ghosts of their pasts and a growing affection that could strengthen both the Union and their souls - or lead to their downfall.

In Mules and Men, some of the rich cultural heritage of black America is revealed and preserved. In the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston returned to her home town of Eatonville, Florida, to collect and record the oral histories, songs, and sermons, many dating back to slavery times, that she remembered hearing as a child. These highly metaphorical folktales, "big old lies", and powerful songs helped her to recover her history, and preserve an important part of American culture.

Here is Gayl Jones' classic novel, the tale of blues singer Ursa, consumed by her hatred of the 19th-century slave master who fathered both her grandmother and mother.

Caren Gray manages Belle Vie, a sprawling antebellum plantation that sits between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where the past and the present coexist uneasily. The estate's owners have turned the place into an eerie tourist attraction, complete with full-dress re-enactments and carefully restored slave quarters. Outside the gates, a corporation with ambitious plans has been busy snapping up land from struggling families who have been growing sugar cane for generations, and now replacing local employees with illegal laborers. Tensions mount when the body of a female migrant worker is found in a shallow grave on the edge of the property.

Welcome to Bailey's Café, the most mythically real diner you've ever walked into. Presided over by Bailey and his helpmate, Nadine, it is a magnet that draws a wide variety of the "colored" people of 1948, each with a story to tell.

Josephine "Jojo" Best has it all figured out. Just 17, she's been to college, she has her own hairdressing shop, and nothing will distract her from her goals. That is, until handsome George Brooks begins to pursue her. Then the return of her childhood nemesis complicates her life even further. No girl is immune to Adam Morgan's charm. But when a wound brings him home from the War Between the States, it's a girl he used to call "Pest" who's turning the tables. All grown up, Jojo is being courted by another soldier, and Adam knows it would be foolish to play with her heart.

Born in 1860s Missouri, nobody expected George Washington Carver to succeed. Slaves were not allowed to be educated. After the Civil War, Carver enrolled in classes and proved to be a star student. He became the first black student at Iowa State Agricultural College and later its first black professor. He went on to the Tuskegee Institute where he specialized in botany (the study of plants) and developed techniques to grow crops better. His work with vegetables, especially peanuts, made him famous and changed agriculture forever.

Henry Brown came to be known as Box; he "entered the world a slave". He was put to work as a child and passed down from one generation to the next - as property. When he was an adult, his wife and children were sold away from him out of spite. Henry Brown watched as his family left bound in chains, headed to the deeper South. What more could be taken from him? But then hope - and help - came in the form of the Underground Railroad. Escape!

All heroes have fatal flaws and a moment of defining hubris, but few rise from the ashes to achieve greater heights. In 1884 Deputy US Marshal Bass Reeves was arrested for murder and placed among his own prisoners in Hell on the Border, the infamous federal jail in Fort Smith, Arkansas. It was the single greatest setback of his illustrious career, but it wouldn't be his last mistake or trial by fire. In The Forsaken and the Dead we meet Reeves again. In the 1890s, past his prime, Reeves proceeds through the valleys and shadows of Indian and Oklahoma Territories.

Babe is a charismatic and widely loved man, a gambler with a gift for gab that often gets him out of tricky situations. He’s also a dreamer, something he shares with his patient and loving wife, Rosie. They both yearn for financial stability and see the land they own as insurance for future generations. But when Babe and a few comrades enlist in a scheme that improbably falls apart, he endangers the little security the family has. On the verge of losing everything, what’s a family man to do? If you’re a gambler like Babe, you double down and risk it all for one big score.

Nach dem Triumph von Underground Railroad der neue Roman von Colson Whitehead Florida, Anfang der 1960er-Jahre. Der sechzehnjährige Elwood lebt mit seiner Großmutter im schwarzen Ghetto von Tallahassee und ist ein Bewunderer Martin Luther Kings. Als er einen Platz am College bekommt, scheint sein Traum von gesellschaftlicher Veränderung in Erfüllung zu gehen. Doch durch einen Zufall gerät er in ein gestohlenes Auto und wird ohne gerechtes Verfahren in die Besserungsanstalt Nickel Academy gesperrt. Dort werden die Jungen missbraucht, gepeinigt und ausgenutzt.

“Kids always search for heroes, so we might as well have a say in it”, Brad Meltzer realized, and so he envisioned this friendly, fun approach to biography - for his own kids, and for yours. Each book tells the story of one of America’s icons in a vivacious, conversational way. Each book focuses on a particular character trait that made that role model heroic. For example, Rosa Parks dared to stand up for herself and other African Americans by staying seated, and as a result she helped end public bus segregation and launch the country’s Civil Rights Movement.