My favorite AA fiction
Discover the best African American fiction with my curated book list, featuring standout titles like Kindred by Octavia Butler, Terry McMillan's The Interruption of Everything, and Alice Walker's The Third Life of Grange Copeland. From gripping novels by Carl Weber to powerful stories by Tananarive Due, explore must-read books that celebrate rich storytelling, diverse voices, and unforgettable characters. Perfect for fans of literary fiction seeking their next favorite read.
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A Woman's Worth
by Tracy Price-Thompson
Bestselling novelist Price-Thompson is back with a compelling novel about a father's love, a mother's shame, and the daughter for whom they're willing to sacrifice everything.
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Kindred
by Octavia Butler
Selected by The Atlantic as one of THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVELS. ("You have to read them.") From the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo award winner The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. “I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.” Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times). “Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.” —N. K. Jemisin This book has been published with two different covers. Customers will be shipped the cover available.
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In Search of Satisfaction
by J. California Cooper
With In Search Of Satisfaction, Cooper gracefully portrays men and women, some good and others wickedly twisted, caught in their individual thickets of want and need on a once-grand plantation. In Yoville, "a legal town-ship founded by the very rich for their own personal use," a freed slave named Josephus fathers two daughters, Ruth and Yinyang, by two different women. His desire to give Yinyang and himself money and opportunities oozes through the family like an elixir. In seeking the legacy left by their father, Ruth and Yinyang pull each other, their families, and their Yoville neighbors into a vortex of ever-powerful emotion.
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The Wake of the Wind
by J. California Cooper
A dramatic and thought-provoking novel of one family's triumph in the face of the hardships and challenges of the post-Civil War South. The Wake of the Wind, J. California Cooper's third novel, is her most penetrating look yet at the challenges that generations of African Americans have had to overcome in order to carve out a home for themselves and their families. Set in Texas in the waning years of the Civil War, the novel tells the dramatic story of a remarkable heroine, Lifee, and her husband, Mor. When Emancipation finally comes to Texas, Mor, Lifee, and the extended family they create from other slaves who are also looking for a home and a future, set out in search of a piece of land they can call their own. In the face of constant threats, they manage not only to survive but to succeed--their crops grow, their children thrive, they educate themselves and others. Lifee and Mor pass their intelligence, determination, and talents along to their children, the next generation to surge forward. At once tragic and triumphant, this is an epic story that captures with extraordinary authenticity the most important struggle of the last hundred years.
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Blood on the Leaves
by Jeff Stetson
The only African-American prosecutor in Jackson, Mississippi, James Reynolds finds himself in the morally challenging position of prosecuting a brilliant professor, a second-generation civil rights leader who has been accused of the vigilante killings of whites previously acquitted for hate crimes. A first novel. Reprint.
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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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The Living Blood
by Tananarive Due
Award-winning author Tananarive Due's spine-tingling tale of supernatural suspense "weaves a stronger net than ever" ("Kirkus Reviews") as a woman searches for inherited power that can save her hometown from the forces of evil.
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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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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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Moses, Man of the Mountain
by Zora Neale Hurston
A fictionized biography of Moses as a religious leader and a great voodoo man, told in Negro vernacular.
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Jonah's Gourd Vine
by Zora Neale Hurston
Despite being a married man and pastor of Zion Hope, John Buddy Pearson is a "natchel man" during the week "who loves too many women for his own good."--Back cover.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person -- no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.
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Wrapped in Rainbows
by Valerie Boyd
Traces the career of the influential African-American writer, citing the historical backdrop of her life and work while considering her relationships with and influences on top literary, intellectual, and artistic figures.
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Truth Be Told
by Victoria Christopher Murray
The author of The Personal Librarian and Essence bestsellers Temptation and Joy returns with a story about one woman's personal and spiritual journey to overcome the consequences of her husband's dark secret. Grace Monroe has the ideal life: a devoted husband, adoring daughters, and a booming career in politics. Newly elected on a Christian platform to the Los Angeles city council, she is determined to put her mistakes behind her and focus on her bright future. But when a secret from her husband's past is revealed, setting off a chain of attacks that threaten to rip her family apart, Grace must face a dilemma that will force her to question her life and her faith.
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Temptation
by Victoria Christopher Murray
Kyla and and her husband, Jefferson, discover the importance of God's love after Kyla's friend, Jasmine, decides to seduce Jefferson.
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Church Folk
by Michele Andrea Bowen
Mississippi, 1963. Essie Lee Lane is a small-town girl from a humble background who doesn't take "stuff" from nobody. Yet even she isn't ready for the Reverend Theophilus Simmons, one of the South's most fiery, respected young preachers during an era of vast social change. Down-to-earth, caring, and oh-so-fine, he's everything Essie never thought she'd find in a man, and he realizes she is everything a pastor needs in a wife-a First Lady to share the joys and challenges of his ministry. But Essie and Theophilus soon discover that dealing with the contentious members of Theophilus's church will be no honeymoon. With their parishioners in turmoil and their denomination facing a major scandal, Essie and Theophilus must put their faith and love to the ultimate test as they struggle to lead their congregation to God's sweetest rewards.
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Second Sunday
by Michele Andrea Bowen
When the members of the Gethsemane Missionary Baptist Church prepare for its one-hundredth anniversary celebration, the unexpected death of the pastor sets the congregation at odds over who the replacement pastor should be.
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The Preacher's Son
by Carl Weber
Bishop T.K. Wilson's decision to run for borough president has unexpected repercussions when his children, models of respectability in public, pursue their own goals and deal with their own temptations and demons.
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The Interruption of Everything
by Terry McMillan
An African-American woman in her forties discovers that the unplanned life may be the best.
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The Third Life of Grange Copeland
by Alice Walker
Despondent over the futility of life in the South, black tenant farmer Grange Copeland leaves his wife and son in Georgia to head North. After meeting an equally humiliating existence there, he returns to Georgia, years later, to find his son, Brownfield, imprisoned for the murder of his wife. As the guardian of the couple's youngest daughter, Grange Copeland is looking at his third -- and final -- chance to free himself from spiritual and social enslavement.
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Redemption Song
by Bertice Berry
Owner of a small African-American bookshop, Miss Cozy has an unique gift: Customers who walk through her door rarely leave without a book that speaks directly to their life. But when Josephine--"Fina"--and Ross arrive in search of an obscure, unpublished manuscript written by a slave woman, Miss Cozy knows that all her visions have been leading her to this magical day. Yet Miss Cozy has no intention of selling the manuscript--no matter the price. So she offers Fina and Ross an alternative. They can read it together at the store. It was not what they hoped for, but their interest in the extraordinary love story is about as strong as their uncanny attraction for one another . . . one they both sense runs much deeper than a kiss. In the course of a few days, Fina and Ross realize that this powerful book has special meaning for the two of them--and that the path to their shared future may be linked to something that happened more than a century ago. . . .
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Groove
by Geneva Holliday
Four very different friends--Geneva, a single mother; Noah, a gay man secretly dating women; Chevy, who has borrowed $5,000 from her friend for breast augmentation surgery; and Crystal, whose boyfriend, Kendrick, has moved in with her--embark on a seriesof sexual escapades over the course of a summer in New York City.