Browse a list of classic books by Black authors that have had a significant impact on the history of modern literature.
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
One of the BBC’s ‘100 Novels That Shaped Our World’
A worldwide bestseller and the first part of Achebe’s African Trilogy, Things Fall Apart is the compelling story of one man’s battle to protect his community against the forces of change.
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Sethe is now miles away from Sweet Home – the farm where she was kept as a slave for many years. Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, Sethe is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, ‘Beloved’.
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
Defeated and embittered by a country which treats him as a non-being, the ‘invisible man’ retreats into an underground cell, where he smokes, drinks, listens to jazz and recounts his search for identity in white society – as an optimistic student in the Deep South, in the north with the black activist group the Brotherhood, and in the Harlem race riots – and explains how he came to be living underground . . .
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin
Drawing on James Baldwin’s own boyhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, his first novel tells the story of young Johnny Grimes. Johnny is destined to become a preacher like his father, Gabriel, at the Temple of the Fire Baptized, where the church swells with song and it is as if ‘the Holy Ghost were riding on the air’. But he feels only scalding hatred for Gabriel, whose fear and fanaticism lead him to abuse his family. Johnny vows that, for him, things will be different. This blazing tale is full of passion and guilt, of secret sinners and prayers singing on the wind.
The Colour Purple
Alice Walker
Sisters Celie and Nettie share the pain and struggle of growing up as African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Forced into an abusive marriage, at least Celie can offer Nettie refuge from their violent father in her new home – until Nettie catches the attention of Celie’s husband and is forced to leave and forge her own journey.
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler
In 1976, Dana dreams of being a writer.
In 1815, she is assumed a slave.
When Dana first meets Rufus on a Maryland plantation, he’s drowning. She saves his life – and it will happen again and again.
Neither of them understands his power to summon her whenever his life is threatened, nor the significance of the ties that bind them.
But each time Dana is pulled back to the past, she finds herself confronting secrets she never knew ran through her blood.
The Souls of Black Folk
W. E. B. Du Bois
When The Souls of Black Folk was first published in 1903, it had a galvanizing effect on the conversation about race in America – and it remains both a touchstone in the literature of African America and a beacon in the fight for civil rights. W. E. B. Du Bois combines history and stirring autobiography to reflect on the magnitude of American racism and to chart a path forward against oppression.
Native Son
Richard Wright
Reckless, angry and adrift, Bigger Thomas has grown up trapped in a life of poverty in the slums of Chicago. But a job with the affluent Dalton family provides the setting for a catastrophic collision between his world and theirs. Hunted by citizen and police alike, and baited by prejudiced officials, Bigger finds himself the cause célèbre in an ever-narrowing endgame.
If Beale Street Could Talk
James Baldwin
Harlem, the black soul of New York City, in the era of Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. The narrator of Baldwin’s novel is Tish – nineteen, and pregnant. Her lover Fonny, the father of her child, is in jail accused of rape. Flashbacks from their love affair are woven into the compelling struggle of two families to win justice for Fonny. To this love story James Baldwin brings a spare and impassioned intensity, charging it with universal resonance and power.
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Malcolm X
From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America’s black ghettos Malcolm X turned, in a dramatic prison conversion, to the puritanical fervour of the Black Muslims. As their spokesman, he became identified in the white press as a terrifying teacher of race hatred; but to his direct audience, oppressed American Black people, he brought hope and self-respect. This autobiography (written with Alex Haley) reveals his quick-witted integrity, usually obscured by batteries of frenzied headlines, and the fierce idealism which led him to reject both liberal hypocrisies and black racialism.
Ain’t I a Woman
Sojourner Truth
‘I am a woman’s rights. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I am as strong as any man that is now.’
A former slave and one of the most powerful orators of her time, Sojourner Truth fought for the equal rights of Black women throughout her life. This selection of her impassioned speeches is accompanied by the words of other inspiring African American female campaigners from the nineteenth century.
Black Teacher
Beryl Gilroy
The rediscovered classic: an unforgettable memoir by a trailblazing black woman in post-war London, introduced by Bernardine Evaristo (‘I dare anyone to read it and not come away shocked, moved and entertained . . . One of the unsung heroines of Black British literature.’)
Giovanni’s Room
James Baldwin
When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend’s return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened – while Giovanni’s life descends into tragedy.
Maud Martha
Gwendolyn Brooks
Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago. Amidst the crumbling taverns and overgrown yards, she dreams: of New York, romance, her future. She admires dandelions, learns to drink coffee, falls in love, decorates her kitchenette, visits the Jungly Hovel, guts a chicken, buys hats, gives birth. But her lighter-skinned husband has dreams too: of the Foxy Cats Club, other women, war. And the ‘scraps of baffled hate’ – a certain word from a saleswoman; that visit to the cinema; the cruelty of a department store Santa Claus – are always there . . .
Sister Outsider
Audre Lorde
The revolutionary writings of Audre Lorde gave voice to those ‘outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women’. Uncompromising, angry and yet full of hope, this collection of her essential prose – essays, speeches, letters, interviews – explores race, sexuality, poetry, friendship, the erotic and the need for female solidarity, and includes her landmark piece ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’.
White Egrets
Derek Walcott
In White Egrets, Derek Walcott treats his characteristic subjects – the Caribbean’s complex colonial legacy, the Western artistic tradition, the blessings and withholdings of old Europe (Andalucia, the Mezzogiorno, Amsterdam), the unaccommodating sublime of the new world, time’s cunning passages and the poet’s place in all of this – with passionate intensity and drive that recall his greatest work. Through the systolic and mesmerising repetition of theme and imagery, Walcott carries his surf-like cadence from poem to poem and from sequence to sequence in this celebratory and close-knit collection.
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry
In south side Chicago, Walter Lee, a Black chauffeur, dreams of a better life and hopes to use his father’s life insurance money to open a liquor store. His mother, who rejects the liquor business, uses some of the money to secure a proper house for the family. Mr Lindner, a representative of the all-white neighbourhood, tries to buy them out. Walter sinks the rest of the money into his business scheme, only to have it stolen by one of his partners. In despair Walter contacts Lindner, and almost begs to buy them out, but with the help of his wife, Walter finally finds a way to assert his dignity.
The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Amos Tutuola
This classic novel tells the phantasmagorical story of an alcoholic man and his search for his dead palm-wine tapster. As he travels through the land of the dead, he encounters a host of supernatural and often terrifying beings – among them the complete gentleman who returns his body parts to their owners and the insatiable hungry-creature. Mixing Yoruba folktales with what T. S. Eliot described as a ‘creepy crawly imagination’, The Palm-Wine Drinkard is regarded as the seminal work of African literature.
One Day I Will Write About This Place
Binyavanga Wainaina
In this vivid and compelling debut, Wainaina takes us through his school days, his failed attempt to study in South Africa, a moving family reunion in Uganda, and his travels around Kenya.The landscape in front of him always claims his main attention, but he also evokes the shifting political scene that unsettles his views on family, tribe, and nationhood. Throughout, reading is his refuge and his solace. And when, in 2002, a writing prize comes through, the door is opened for him to pursue the career that perhaps had been beckoning all along. Resolutely avoiding stereotype and cliche, Wainaina paints every scene in One Day I Will Write About This Place with a highly distinctive and hugely memorable brush.
Twelve Years a Slave
Solomon Northup
Twelve Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a Louisiana cotton plantation.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
Petals of Blood
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
After decades of British rule Kenya has declared its independence, but drought and poor harvests still govern the village of Ilmorog. Undeterred, Munira, Karega, Wanja and Abdulla each move to Ilmorog in search of a more provincial life, only to find themselves suspects in a crime that signals a dark turning of the times.
Small Island
Andrea Levy
It is 1948, and England is recovering from a war. But at 21 Nevern Street, London, the conflict has only just begun.
Queenie Bligh’s neighbours don’t approve when she agrees to take in Jamaican lodgers, but with her husband, Bernard, not back from the war, she has little choice in the matter.
Gilbert Joseph was one of the many Jamaican men who joined the RAF to fight Hitler. But when he returns to England as a civilian he doesn’t receive the welcome he was expecting, and it’s desperation that drives him to knock at Queenie’s door. Gilbert’s wife Hortense, who for years has longed for a better life in England, soon joins him. But London is far from the golden city of her dreams, and even Gilbert is not the man she thought he was.
All About Love
bell hooks
“The word “love” is most often defined as a noun, yet . . . we would all love better if we used it as a verb,” writes bell hooks as she comes out fighting and on fire in All About Love. Here, at her most provocative and intensely personal, the renowned scholar, cultural critic, and feminist skewers our view of love as romance. In its place she offers a proactive new ethic for a people and a society bereft with lovelessness. As bell hooks uses her incisive mind and razor-sharp pen to explore the question “What is love?” her answers strike at both the mind and heart. In thirteen concise chapters, hooks examines her own search for emotional connection and society’s failure to provide a model for learning to love.
This Black History Month reading list was originally published in 2023.
