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USA Today
20-02-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
10 new books by Black authors to read this Black History Month, from thrillers to rom-coms
10 new books by Black authors to read this Black History Month, from thrillers to rom-coms Black literature is far too expansive to cover in just a month, especially if you look back through history at the works of luminaries like Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni. But if you're looking to add some recently released titles to your TBR pile this Black History Month, we've got a few ideas. And, if you're looking to add more authors of color to your shelf, check out these tips from BookTok creators on how to diversifying your reading. In no particular order, here are 10 releases from Black authors in 2025 we think you should read next, whether you like romance, historical fiction, memoirs or thrillers. 'Listen to Your Sister' by Neena Viel Billed as the perfect book for Jordan Peele fans, 'Listen To Your Sister' is about 25-year-old Calla, who has just become guardian to her 16-year-old brother Jamie. Overwhelmed with raising her younger brother and frustrated from the lack of help from middle sibling Dre, Calla is tormented by nightmares of both her brothers dying. Now, after a protest goes awry, the siblings must flee and take refuge in a remote cabin where Calla's nightmares just may come true. 'Good Dirt' by Charmaine Wilkerson From the bestselling author of 'Black Cake' comes a story about an affluent Black New England family at the center of public spectacle following a home invasion where their son Baz was murdered. The collective allure only heightens 18 years later when daughter Ebby is left at the altar by another high-profile New Englander. Ebby's past follows her even as she flees to France. 'Good Dirt' is a sweeping family epic that will have you engrossed in the stories of every generation of the Freeman family. 'Death of the Author' by Nnedi Okorafor From bestselling Africanfuturist author Okorafor (who also coined the term) comes a book-within-a-book that blends sci-fi and literary fiction. In 'Death of the Author,' disabled Nigerian writer Zelu is fresh off a publisher rejection and an unceremonious firing when she begins to write something new. The result is an epic tale of androids and AI warring in the aftermath of human civilization. But when the book publishes and Zelu is thrust into literary stardom, the novel changes the future for both humanity and the robots who come after it. 'Junie' by Erin Crosby Eckstine 'Junie' follows a 16-year-old girl who has been enslaved on the Bellereine Plantation in Alabama since she was born. By day, she cooks, cleans and tends to the white master's daughter. By night, she dreams of poetry and roams the forest grieving the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie. When guests arrive in town with a plan that will uproot Junie's life, her act of desperation wakes Minnie's spirit from the grave, also unveiling horrifying secrets about Bellereine. 'I Lived to Tell the Story' by Tamika D. Mallory This memoir comes from the cofounder of the Women's March, giving an unfiltered look at the moments that shaped Mallory as an activist and a woman. Mallory details her early days growing up as the daughter of Harlem civil rights organizers as well as her own experience with injustice, healing and survival behind the headlines and podiums. 'The Wickedest' by Caleb Femi Femi's poetry collection is an immersive journey through one night at an underground London house party. It blends lyrics, sonnets, text messages, vignettes, monologues and more to craft a minute-by-minute chronicle of much more than just nightlife – 'The Wickedest' also waxes about low-income communities of color, marginalization and exclusivity. 'Afro Sheen' by George E. Johnson 'Afro Sheen' is a behind-the-scenes look at the founder of the company behind Afro Sheen and Ultra Sheen, the first Black-owned company to be traded on Wall Street. This memoir dives into George Ellis Johnson's journey as a self-made businessman from humble beginnings, eventually pioneering a cultural moment to fill a gap in the Black haircare industry. 'Harlem Rhapsody' by Victoria Christopher Murray This historical fiction novel tells the story of the women who ignited the Harlem Renaissance. It follows Jessie Redmon Fauset, a high school teacher from Washington D.C. who arrives in Harlem as she becomes the first Black woman named literary editor of 'The Crisis" magazine. But her secret affair with her older boss, W. E. B. Du Bois, threatens her position. Determined to prove herself, Jessie throws herself into helping 'The Crisis' thrive by scouting writers who would someday become literary icons, including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen. 'I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I'm Trapped in a Rom-Com' by Kimberly Lemming In 'I Got Abducted by Aliens and Now I'm Trapped in a Rom-Com,' a wildlife biology Ph.D. student is attacked by a lion, only to be saved (and abducted) and taken to a dinosaur-filled alien planet. Now, Dorothy will have to team up with a mysterious, sexy alien Sol and the 'equally hot, equally dangerous' Lok as they explore the planet, all while navigating a brimming attraction to both aliens. 'Black in Blues' by Imani Perry Perry's latest nonfiction work interrogates the connection of the color blue in Black history and culture, both as a symbol of hope and clarity and as one of melancholy and heartbreak. Perry, who won the National Book Award for nonfiction for her 2022 'South to America,' traces Blackness and the color blue from dyed indigo cloths of West Africa to American blues music to the flowers Perry planted to honor a loved one. Looking for your next great read? USA TODAY has you covered. Taste is subjective, and USA TODAY Books has plenty of genres to recommend. Check out the 15 new releases we're most excited about in 2025. Is dystopian your thing? Check out these books that are similar to 'The Hunger Games' and '1984.' Or if you want something with lower stakes and loveable characters, see if a "cozy mystery" or "cozy fantasy" book is for you. If you want the most popular titles, check out USA TODAY's Best-selling Booklist. Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, check out her recent articles or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
New York Times
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
An Unsolved Murder Haunts an Elite Black Family in New England
'Good Dirt,' like Charmaine Wilkerson's 2022 best-selling debut, 'Black Cake,' is an engrossing epic that explores how intergenerational trauma shapes and complicates family legacies and bonds. At the heart of the novel is 29-year-old Ebony 'Ebby' Freeman, the daughter of one of the few Black families in a wealthy New England enclave. She's engaged to marry a white man, Henry Pepper, the 'rising young star of an old banking family.' Ebby and her parents, Soh and Ed, hope her wedding will eclipse the tragedy that thrust her into the spotlight two decades earlier. When Ebby was 10, she found her 14-year-old brother, Baz, dead on the floor of her father's study, shot by intruders who were never caught. Lying next to his body were the shattered pieces of a family heirloom nicknamed 'Old Mo': a 20-gallon stoneware jar crafted by an enslaved potter in the mid-1800s. The crime remained unsolved and made headlines. A photograph of young Ebony in bloodied clothing won an international award, and the media has kept an eye on 'the little Black girl who had survived a suburban tragedy' ever since. Grief-stricken, Soh and Ed have remained deeply protective of their only living child well into her adulthood. Now, the media's interest is revived when Ebby's relationship with Henry ends in a devastating, and very public, fashion. Furious with Henry for having 'shown the world that Ebony Freeman, try as she might, could not escape the mantle of misfortune that had settled over her,' Ebby flees Connecticut for the French countryside, where she hopes to 'stay away for a good long while.' But when her troubles follow her there, Ebby finds a different kind of solace in writing her family's history, based on the cherished stories about Old Mo her parents and grandparents told her and Baz as they were growing up. Wilkerson deftly employs a broad chorus of perspectives throughout, with chapters told from the points of view of six generations in Ebby's family, both enslaved and free; and others in the Freemans' orbit. Even the treasured jar gets a turn. We learn that Old Mo's maker, Moses, carved the initials 'MO' under the lip of the jar, presumably in reference to his owner, Martin Oldham, who owned a pottery and brickworks in South Carolina. Oldham looked the other way as the people he enslaved taught one another to read and write, at a time when their literacy was punishable by death. But Oldham is no savior; Moses is not spared slavery's cruelty or brutality. Still, the Freemans read the 'MO' as Moses' 'veiled reference to himself.' Inspired by a hidden message Moses inscribed on the bottom of Old Mo, his fellow laborer Edward 'Willis' Freeman (Ebby's great-great-great-grandfather) carried the jar with him on his dangerous escape to freedom. In the home Willis later made with his wife and children in Massachusetts, Old Mo became a community repository for secret messages among free and enslaved people — and offered generations of Freemans the reassurance that 'good could come of bad, that comfort could follow strife, that looking at their past could help to guide their future.' In the canon of slavery narratives, which typically take place in agricultural settings, craftspeople are rarely the focus. And yet, as Wilkerson writes in an author's note, 'the mass production of pottery in the American South' was an area of labor that 'regularly relied on both enslaved and free Black people.' Wilkerson also forgoes the familiar in her characterizations of the two Black lineages in the novel: Both the Freemans and the Blisses (Ebby's mother's family) have owned land in Massachusetts since the 1600s, and include pioneers in their fields as 'farmers, craftsmen, teachers, doctors, lawyers, politicians and investors.' Unlike the Black bourgeoisie of Stephen L. Carter's novel 'The Emperor of Ocean Park,' or the real-life elites in Lawrence Otis Graham's 'Our Kind of People,' Ebby's people derive their pride from resilience in the face of adversity, not in their exceptionalism or proximity to whiteness. 'This is what it means to be Isabella 'Sojourner' Bliss Freeman,' Wilkerson writes after Henry has jilted Ebby on their wedding day: Ebby likewise is keenly aware of how she's perceived, the too-fine line between her private life and the public spectacle muddling her grief for both her brother and Henry: 'Love leaves a memory in the heart,' she thinks, 'even when your head tells you it shouldn't.' Wilkerson masterfully weaves these threads of love, loss and legacy through Old Mo's journey as well as the ongoing mystery of Baz's murder. The result is a thoroughly researched and beautifully imagined family saga, with a moving and hopeful ending.
