20 Books for Black History Month
By Faber Editor, 21 October 2022
For Black History Month this year, we’ve selected 20 books from brilliant Black writers, ranging from classic works of non-fiction to cutting edge poetry. Whether you’re looking to learn more about Black British history or discover a fiction favourite, read on for our picks.
Freedom is a Constant Struggle
Angela Y. Davis
In these newly collected essays, interviews and speeches, world-renowned activist, scholar and author of Women, Race and Class Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.
Reflecting on the importance of Black feminism, intersectionality and prison abolitionism for today’s struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyses today’s struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine.
The Fire Next Time
James Baldwin
James Baldwin’s impassioned plea to ‘end the racial nightmare’ in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and succeeding in its aim of giving a mainstream voice to the civil rights movement. Told in the form of two intensely personal letters, The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the legacy of slavery and continuing racial injustice.
The Fire Next Time begins with a letter to Baldwin’s nephew, just fourteen years old at the time, reflecting on America one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The second essay, ‘Down at the Cross’ addresses the African American community’s relationship to both Christianity and Islam, examining Baldwin’s own experiences as a teenage pastor and later interactions with the Nation of Islam.
Black and Female (2022)
Tsitsi Dangarembga
This paradigm-shifting essay collection weaves the personal and political in an illuminating exploration of internationally acclaimed novelist Tsitsi Dangarembga’s complex relationship with race and gender. At once philosophical, intimate and urgent, Dangarembga’s landmark essays address the profound cultural and political questions that underpin her novels for the first time. From her experience of life with a foster family in Dover and the difficulty of finding a publisher as a young Zimbabwean novelist, to the ways in which colonialism continues to disrupt the lives and minds of those subjugated by empire, Dangarembga writes to recenter marginalised voices.
Black and Female offers a powerful vision toward re-membering – to use Toni Morrison’s word – those whose identities and experiences continue to be fractured by the intersections of history, race and gender.
Black & British: A Forgotten History (2021)
David Olusoga
In this vital re-examination of a shared history, historian and broadcaster David Olusoga tells the rich and revealing story of the long relationship between the British Isles and the people of Africa and the Caribbean.
Drawing on new genealogical research, original records and expert testimony, Black and British reaches back to Roman Britain, the medieval imagination, Elizabethan ‘blackamoors’ and the global slave-trading empire. It shows that the great industrial boom of the nineteenth century was built on American slavery, and that Black Britons fought at Trafalgar and in the trenches of both World Wars. Black British history is woven into the cultural and economic histories of the nation. It is not a singular history, but one that belongs to us all. This revised and updated edition features a new chapter encompassing the Windrush scandal and the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, events which put Black British history at the centre of urgent national debate.
Poor (2020)
Caleb Femi
In his collection Poor, Caleb Femi combines poetry and original photography to explore the trials, tribulations, dreams and joys of young Black boys in twenty-first century Peckham. He contemplates the ways in which they are informed by the built environment of concrete walls and gentrifying neighbourhoods that form their stage, writes a coded, near-mythical history of the personalities and sagas of his South London youth and pays tribute to the rappers and artists who spoke to their lives.
The Sellout (2017)
Paul Beatty
A biting satire about a young man’s isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game.
Born in Dickens on the southern outskirts of Los Angeles, the narrator of The Sellout spent his childhood as the subject in his father’s racially charged psychological studies. He is told that his father’s work will lead to a memoir that will solve their financial woes. But when his father is killed in a drive-by shooting, he discovers there never was a memoir. All that’s left is a bill for a drive-through funeral.
In his trademark absurdist style, which has the uncanny ability to make readers want to both laugh and cry, The Sellout is an outrageous and outrageously entertaining indictment of our time.
Black British Lives Matter (2022)
Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder
Black British Lives Matter is a clarion call for equality, from nineteen of the most prominent Black figures in Britain today. Contributors include David Olusoga, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, Kit de Waal, Dr Anne-Marie Imafidon, Sir David Adjaye, Leroy Logan and Professor Kehinde Andrews. Black British Lives Matter is now also a podcast investigating what it means to be Black in Britain today.
Lenny Henry and Marcus Ryder introduce an essential collection of essays arguing how and why we need to fight for Black lives to matter – not just for Black people, but for British society as a whole. Writing across a wide range of subjects, and drawing on personal experience, all nineteen writers explore the unique contributions, perspectives and importance of Black Britons to the UK and beyond. It is both a celebration of Black British lives and an urgent, agenda-setting manifesto for change.
The Hate U Give (2017)
Angie Thomas
Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this is a powerful, gripping and piercingly relevant YA novel about inequality, police violence, twenty-first century prejudice and one girl’s struggle for justice.
Sixteen-year-old Starr lives in two worlds: the poor neighbourhood where she was born and raised and her posh high school in the suburbs. The uneasy balance between them is shattered when Starr is the only witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed best friend, Khalil, by a police officer. Now what Starr says could destroy her community. It could also get her killed.
African Europeans: An Untold History (2022)
Olivette Otele
Renowned historian Olivette Otele uncovers the untold history of Europeans of African descent, from Saint Maurice who became the leader of a Roman legion and Renaissance scholar Juan Latino, to abolitionist Mary Prince and the activist, scholars and grime artists of the present day. Tracing African European heritage through the vibrant, complex, and often brutal experiences of individuals both ordinary and extraordinary, she sheds new light not only on the past but also on questions very much alive today – about racism, identity, citizenship, power and resilience. African Europeans is a landmark celebration of this integral, vibrantly complex slice of European history, and will redefine the field for years to come.
Known and Strange Things (2017)
Teju Cole
A blazingly intelligent first collection of essays from the award-winning author of Open City. With these pieces on politics, photography, travel, history and literature – many of which have become viral sensations, shared and debated around the globe – Cole solidifies his place as one of today’s most powerful and original voices. On page after page, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people and historical moments.
Persuasive and provocative, erudite yet accessible, Known and Strange Things is an opportunity to live within Cole’s wide-ranging enthusiasms, and a chance to see the world in surprising and affecting new frames.
A Blood Condition (2021)
Kayo Chingonyi
A Blood Condition tells a story of inheritance – the people, places, cultures and memories that form us. Kayo Chingonyi explores how distance and time, nations and a century’s history, can collapse within a body; our past continuous in our present. From London, Leeds, and the North-East to the banks of the Zambezi river, Chingonyi’s moving, expansive second poetry collection considers change and permanence, grief and joy and the painful ongoing process of letting go with remarkable music and clarity.
Homegoing (2017)
Yaa Gyasi
Effia and Esi: two sisters with two very different destinies. One sold into slavery; one a slave trader’s wife. The consequences of their fate reverberate through the generations that follow. As each chapter offers up a new descendant, alternating between Effia’s and Esi’s bloodline right up to the present day, a chasm of experience and the differing legacies of chance are brought starkly to light.
Epic in its canvas and intimate in its portraits, Homegoing is Yaa Gyasi’s searing and profound debut.
Out of Darkness, Shining Light (2020)
Petina Gappah
This is the story of the body of Bwana Daudi, the Doctor, the explorer David Livingstone – and the sixty-nine men and women who carried his remains for 1,500 miles across the African interior so that he could be borne across the sea and buried in his own country. This is the story of those in the shadows of history: those who saved a white man’s bones, his dark companions, who became his faithful retinue on an epic funeral march – little knowing that his corpse carried the maps that sowed the seeds of the continent’s brutal colonisation and enslavement. This is the story of how human bravery, loyalty, and love can triumph over darkness – and it is Petina Gappah’s radical masterpiece.
House of Lords and Commons (2018)
Ishion Hutchinson
Ishion Hutchinson’s collection of poems is a profound engagement with culture and landscape, seascape and language, inheritance and race. It speaks to a pursuit of justice and rebalance of a world in which lords and commoners must live side by side. House of Lords and Commons is a skilfully crafted and tender expression of human experience in a world of prejudice and danger that is also a world of intense colour, remarkable music and indefatigable love.
We Were Eight Years In Power (2018)
Ta-Nehisi Coates
This powerful and necessary portrait of America under Obama comes from the prize-winning, bestselling author of Between the World and Me.
From 2008-2016, the leader of the free world was a Black man. Obama’s presidency reshaped America and transformed the international conversation around politics, race, equality. But it attracted criticism and bred discontent as much as it inspired hope. In this essential modern classic, Ta-Nehisi Coates took stock of the Obama era in the first year of the Trump presidency, speaking authoritatively from political, ideological and cultural perspectives. Coates draws a sophisticated and penetrating portrait of America in a changing cultural landscape.
What Is Yours Is Not Yours (2017)
Helen Oyeyemi
Playful, ambitious, and exquisitely imagined, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours is built around the idea of keys, literal and metaphorical. The key to a house, the key to a heart, the key to a secret – Oyeyemi’s keys not only unlock elements of her characters’ lives, they promise further labyrinths on the other side.
Oyeyemi’s tales span multiple times and landscapes as they tease boundaries between coexisting realities. Is a key a gate, a gift, or an invitation? What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours captivates as it explores the many possible answers.
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (1984)
Maya Angelou
The first and best-known of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary seven volumes of autobiography is a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. As a Black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration.
Here, Maya Angelou beautifully evokes her childhood with her grandmother in the American South of the 1930s. She learns the power of the white folks at the other end of town and suffers the terrible trauma of rape by her mother’s lover. Reviewing the book in 1970, the Washington Post wrote ‘There isn’t any easy, which is to say false, line in the book [. . .] She is outside and inside at the same time, looking at all of it with double vision.’
Americanah (2021)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
As teenagers in Lagos, Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love. Their Nigeria is under military dictatorship, and people are fleeing the country if they can. The self-assured Ifemelu departs for America. There she suffers defeats and triumphs, finds and loses relationships, all the while feeling the weight of something she never thought of back home: race. Obinze had hoped to join her, but post-9/11 America will not let him in, and he plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London.
Fearless, gripping, spanning three continents and numerous lives, the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Americanah is a richly told story of love and expectation set in a globalised world.
The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain (2017)
Ron Ramdin
In this classic, pioneering history, Ron Ramdin traces the roots of Britain’s disadvantaged Black working class. From the development of a small Black presence in the sixteenth century, through the colonial labour institutions of slavery, indentureship, and trade unionism, Ramdin expertly guides us through the stages of creation for a UK minority whose origins are often overlooked. He examines the emergence of a Black radical ideology underpinning twentieth-century struggles against unemployment, racial attacks and workplace inequality, and delves into the murky realms of employer and trade union racism.
Your Silence Will Not Protect You (2017)
Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde described herself as ‘black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York in 1934, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last in the year of her death in 1992. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. Your Silence Will Not Protect You is the first British edition of Lorde’s writing and brings Lorde’s essential poetry, speeches and essays together in one volume for the first time, with a preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an introduction by Sara Ahmed.
A version of this article was originally published on 10 October 2017.