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Curated reading lists of the best fiction and nonfiction by Black women authors, hand-picked by readers who finished the books. Every pick comes with a reason, and every purchase supports the author.



This month's shelf

The South Side girl who kept a list of everything she was supposed to be, and the years she spent deciding which parts to keep. Obama is best here on the ordinary stuff: a small apartment, a piano teacher, a marriage she had to renegotiate out loud.

Ward lost five young Black men from her Mississippi hometown in four years, including her brother. She tells their deaths in reverse and her own life forward, so the two lines meet in the middle. Devastating and worth it.

Gay subtitles this one a memoir of her body and means it literally. She writes about weight, appetite, and the assault that reshaped how she moved through the world, without offering the redemption arc readers keep asking her for.

A hundred years of one family and one shotgun house in New Orleans East, a part of the city the tourist map leaves off. Then Katrina takes the house. Won the National Book Award and earned it.
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Coster's third novel follows Val and Milly, who became friends as the only Black students on a study-abroad trip to France. A decade later, raising daughters a block apart in Brooklyn, they test how far friendship stretches across class and circumstance.
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A Black couple trades their downtown Chicago condo for a quiet suburban subdivision, only for the neighborhood's secrets to erupt into a shocking crime. A thriller from the author of the memoir Three Girls from Bronzeville.
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Rankine's first book after the American trilogy, and her most personal. Two women who call each other sister work through the wounds in their shared history, in a mix of narrative and criticism printed with full-color visuals.
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Danticat's first novel in ten years. A Haitian American woman is caught in a random act of violence one sunny day in Florida, and the aftermath unsettles what she thought she knew about her family and herself.
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