African American Literature Fiction

Tiffany is trapped in a life she never wanted for herself. The man she fell in love with turned out to be a lazy, good-for-nothing womanizer. Night after night Tiffany comes home to Blake’s physical, mental, and verbal abuse. She’s tried leaving it in the past, but somehow he always finds her. Each time, she comes back and convinces herself things will get better. Then one day Blake beats her for the last time. Tiffany decides death is the only way out - and she’s not the one being buried. Her life takes a drastic turn as she attempts to live the life she’s always wanted.

Lyfe Simmons is on top of the world. He has an empire that has been growing bigger every day, a group of friends who would die for each other, and a wife who is down for whatever. What could he possibly be missing? He has basically anything he could ever want right at his fingertips, but he doesn’t have the one thing he wants most: the woman he fell in love with and hasn’t stopped loving since he first laid eyes on her. With so many obstacles and bitter people in the way, can love really conquer all?

Ever since he was a child, the only thing Cyril Anderson wanted was to be down with his brother Cane's crew. Cane Anderson, leader of the notorious Bankroll Crips, was invincible - or so Cyril thought. On the night of Cyril's initiation, things take a terrible turn and leave Cane lying dead in a pool of his own blood. Now the leader of a blood-thirsty gang, there is only one thing that Cyril wants to do: seek revenge.

Around the Way Girls 11 is a fast-paced look at the lives of some street-smart women who think they know it all, but are about to get the lessons of their lives. "Meal Ticket" by Treasure Hernandez: After the tragic death of Yanna's husband at the home of his longtime mistress, Yanna's teenage son is forced to step up and fill his father's shoes as the household's sole meal ticket. The straight-laced student soon links up with an unlikely partner in crime. Also featuring "Party Girls" by Clifford "Spud" Johnson and "Do or Die" by India Johnson-Williams.

Pleasure is his name, one that women whisper - and scream - with desire. As a popular exotic dancer and escort, he fulfills his clients' every sexy fantasy. His climb has taken him from the streets' most lethal ride-or-die ladies to the even more dangerous world of wealthy, powerful women. All along he believed leveraging his chiseled body for a life of luxury would help him outrun his tormented childhood.... But now a mysterious woman has him at her mercy, determined to punish him for reasons he doesn't understand.

With a string of successful novels, Sherryle Kiser Jackson has won a reputation as a fresh voice in Christian urban fiction. In Land of Promiscuity, her mother’s death prompts Rebi Lewis to return to her hometown after years away. It’s not long before all the insecurities of her youth begin to resurface and Rebi finds herself slipping back into her old pattern of promiscuity. But then she reconnects with her former friend Will, and together they discover a long-buried secret - one that will test their capacity for forgiveness.

In this shocking novel of a young girl alone on the streets, Donald Goines delves into yet another facet of the ghetto experience - the dark, despair-ridden world of a black girl's soul.

Sandra took to the streets when she was eight years old and tried to fight off the hunger pangs by shoplifting and moving into the profits of drug pushing. Then she met Chink, and with him she discovered love and affection...as well as rape and murder.

Nikki’s life was a wreck—three years wasted with a deadbeat boyfriend, and then a huge fight with her best friend, Tia. Now, with a promotion at work and a loving new man—who respects her—life is finally going as planned. Until one day, when Tia reveals a secret that will blow Nikki’s new life apart.

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor, William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful white man in antebellum Virginia's Manchester County. Under Robbins's tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation, as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart.

Originally published in 1953, Go Tell It on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem.

An exciting new Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s bold, outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins to question how well she knows herself. And Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America—but faces an unthinkable hardship.

In this captivating tale, Tressa's voyage will expose listeners to a side of a struggling single mother that has yet to be revealed to them. Nikki Turner, the bestselling author of A Hustler's Wife, once again takes you on a safari through the jungle of the fierce and stormy streets, leaving you on the edge of your seat and begging for an encore.

Thirty years ago, Amelia Vaux Tanner and her husband built a house high on the bluffs, a cottage they named Chateau Laveau. For decades, “Ama” played host to American presidents, Wall Street titans, and cultural icons. But her favorite guests have always been her three “goddaughters”: Esperanza “Perry” Soto, a beautiful, talented Afro-Latina lawyer with Ama’s strong, yet guarded personality; Olivia Jones, a gifted Wall Street analyst with Ama’s brilliant, logical mind; and Billie Hayden, a gifted marine biologist and rule-breaker with Ama’s courageous free spirit.

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.

Beverly Jenkins is an incredibly popular author of African-American romances. The Taming of Jessi Rose is the unforgettable tale of Jessi Rose Clayton. In trying to save her family ranch from falling into the greedy hands of the wrong people, Jessi finds a unique solution-hiring outlaw railroad robber Griffin Blake as her protector. Now, with this strong, bronze-bodied man on her side, Jessi might just be tempted to mix business with pleasure.

A Charleston belle with slavery on her conscience. A slave with rebellion in her heart. In South Carolina in 1858, no friendship could be more dangerous.

To his customers and neighbors on 125th street, Ray Carney is an upstanding salesman of reasonably priced furniture, making a decent life for himself and his family. He and his wife Elizabeth are expecting their second child, and if her parents on Striver's Row don't approve of him or their cramped apartment across from the subway tracks, it's still home. Few people know he descends from a line of uptown hoods and crooks, and that his façade of normalcy has more than a few cracks in it. Cracks that are getting bigger all the time.

In this 1983 short story - the only short story Morrison ever wrote - we meet Twyla and Roberta, who have known each other since they were eight years old and spent four months together as roommates in St. Bonaventure shelter. Inseparable then, they lose touch as they grow older, only later to find each other again at a diner, a grocery store, and again at a protest. Seemingly at opposite ends of every problem, and at each other's throats each time they meet, the two women still cannot deny the deep bond their shared experience has forged between them.

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.

Attorney Tamia has a successful career and a promising relationship with her millionaire boyfriend - but when she meets another man, she questions everything about her life. Meanwhile, shocking secrets turn Troy’s life as a pastor’s wife upside down. And Tasha soon loses control as she discovers the drawbacks of her undeniable desirability.