African American Literature Fiction

Ricki Wilde has many talents, but being a Wilde isn’t one of them. As the impulsive artistic daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, she’s the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. Where they’re long-stemmed roses, she’s a dandelion: an adorable bloom that’s actually a weed, born to float wherever the wind blows. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her. When regal nonagenarian Ms. Della invites her to rent the bottom floor of her Harlem brownstone, Ricki jumps at the chance for a fresh beginning.

New York Times and Essence best-selling author Omar Tyree is a pioneer in the megapopular urban fiction genre. His stories feature sexy guys and girls navigating life and love in the city. Set in sunny San Diego, Pecking Order follows Ivan David, an accountant slowly growing fed up with his rich, spoiled clientele. He has a plan to promote business networking parties, but when he meets local diva Lucina Gallo, his simple plan becomes more trouble than it's worth.

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her - but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known. So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North.

In order to find love, you have to take a chance. You have to open yourself up to the possibility of being hurt. You have to expose yourself in a way that you usually wouldn't; allow others to see vulnerabilities that you try to hide. Journalist Aria Smith tried that three years ago and it ended in disaster. Now, she's just trying to focus on moving up the ladder in her career. She's just been handed the most coveted interview in sports writing, so it looks like she's well on her way. Basketball star Tory Barker is fresh off of a championship season and is in high demand right now.

Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself; his wife, Neni; and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty - and Jende is eager to please. Clark's wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at the Edwardses' summer home in the Hamptons.

You just can't plan for this kind of thing. Diane Tate certainly hasn't. She never expected to slowly lose her talented husband to the debilitating effects of early-onset Alzheimer's disease. As a respected family court judge, she's spent her life making tough calls, but when her 68-year-old husband's health worsens and Diane is forced to move him into an assisted living facility, it seems her world is spinning out of control. As Gregory's memory wavers and fades, Diane and her children must reexamine their connection to the man he once was - and learn to love the man he has become.

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird.

The author of 30 critically acclaimed works, Walter Mosley has had his novels translated into 23 languages. The Tempest Tales, an Essence Book Club Recommended Read, features Tempest Landry, a black man shot down by an over-eager cop. But that's not the end of the line for Tempest. Unwilling to accept St. Peter's judgment that he spend eternity in Hell, Tempest is sent back to Harlem - guardian angel in tow - to make things right.

They say that good girls like bad boys, and this was especially true for Pearl Stone, a child born of privilege to a drug baron and reputed killer known in the streets as Big Stone. Although the flashy, fast-paced nature of the streets calls to Pearl, she's been brought up to look but not touch. Yet when a young hustler named Diamonds crawls up from the swamps of Louisiana and sets up shop in New York City, everything Pearl was taught flies out the window.

Denali Peters was sure her life would never get any better. She had two children with a man who showed her with time just how impure his intentions were. At the top of her priority list was being a great mom, but working two jobs and raising her man along with their kids began to take a toll on Denali. Eventually, she realized the importance of self-care and her own happiness…but that happiness came with a hefty price.

How do you deal with another woman coming to your wedding and confessing she's already married to your fiance and carrying his child? That was Jordyn's reality. After her world was turned upside down, she's encouraged by her best friend to still go to Cabo for a week stay to get over her heartbreak. What Jordyn wasn't expecting was running into her high school crush. Newly single, NFL running back Amir Hamilton is the man most women would dream to have. When he takes a vacation to Cabo to let loose before the upcoming season, he didn't expect to meet the shy beauty in a drunken state.

When Noni married the love of her life, she finally thought she would get everything she deserved. Riches, success, status, influence - she had it all as the wife of Mr. Dominick Meyer. But there is more to her title than meets the eye.When she catches Dom cheating and discovers that he isn’t the businessman he portrayed himself to be, her life is changed forever. Finding out that their wealth was amassed from drug money and that Dom has never truly been faithful, she wants out.

Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. After saving a drowning White boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes she's been given a challenge.

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. As Morrison follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, she introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized Black world.

When Sheriff Mapes is summoned to a sugarcane plantation to find a dead Cajun farmer, he knows who committed the crime. Mapes finds himself powerless, however, when nearly 20 elderly black men confess to the murder. Can justice be served, or will the dead man's brutish father pass judgment his way?

In 1925, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now, her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine's family. Nearly 100 years later, Josephine's descendant, Ava, is a single mother who has just lost her job. She moves in with her white grandmother, Martha, a wealthy but lonely woman who pays her grandchild to be her companion.

From one of Britain's most celebrated writers of color, Girl, Woman, Other is a magnificent portrayal of the intersections of identity and a moving and hopeful story of an interconnected group of black British women. Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and short-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize, Girl, Woman, Other paints a vivid portrait of the state of post-Brexit Britain, as well as looking back to the legacy of Britain's colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean.

James Baldwin's groundbreaking novel with a new introduction, Giovanni's Room is set in the Paris of the 1950s, where a young American expatriate finds himself caught between his repressed desires and conventional morality. David has just proposed marriage to his American girlfriend, but while she is away on a trip he becomes involved in a doomed affair with a bartender named Giovanni.

It is the story of 11-year-old Pecola Breedlove--a black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others--who prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning and the tragedy of its fulfillment.

Sly smirk. Heated glance. I knew I was hooked from the first moment our eyes connected. But I'm not the type of woman to give in easily. Especially when his offer is dripping in rule breaking notions threatening to consume me.