Every contemporary fiction book we've recommended, in one place.
Black Chicago in 1925, chorus girls and speakeasies and a filmmaker with secrets, cut against a film student in 2015 interviewing the last woman who was there. The jazz age from inside the Stroll.
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New York wakes up. Each borough gets a human avatar, and they have to find each other before something older takes the city apart. Funny, angry, and the most fun Jemisin has put on a page.
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A broke twenty-three-year-old sleeping with a married man ends up living in his house, befriended by his wife, mentoring his adopted Black daughter. Uncomfortable on purpose. Your group will not agree about Edie and that is the point.
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The only Black editorial assistant at a publishing house gets a second one, and the relief curdles into something else. Starts as workplace satire and turns into a thriller. Best discussed by anyone who has been the only one.
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Two estranged siblings inherit a voice recording and a frozen cake from their mother, and the recording rearranges everything they believed about her. Caribbean history, a swimmer, and a secret that holds up.
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A seventeen-year-old in East Oakland becomes the witness in a police sex scandal she is also the victim of. Mottley wrote it at seventeen herself. Hard, and the writing is remarkable.
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A bigamist in Atlanta, two daughters, and only one of them knows the other exists. Jones tells half the book from each girl, so you switch loyalties in the middle and feel bad about it.
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Adunni is fourteen, sold into marriage in rural Nigeria, then into domestic work in Lagos, and determined to get an education anyway. Written in her own English, which takes ten pages to settle into and then sings.
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One dinner party, one wife whose politician husband is about to be indicted, and the woman she loved twenty years ago. Short, sharp, and owes a debt to Mrs Dalloway that book clubs enjoy chasing.
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Queenie Jenkins is twenty-five, freshly heartbroken, and making choices her grandmother would not approve of. Carty-Williams writes a messy, funny, deeply loving portrait of a young Black woman learning to ask for help. Bridget Jones could never.
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A security guard accuses Emira, a young Black babysitter, of kidnapping the white toddler she's paid to watch, and her employer's guilt spirals into something stranger. Reid skewers performative allyship with a light touch and a perfect ending.
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Two authors who shared one electric week as teenagers meet again fifteen years later at a Brooklyn literary event, and the pages practically steam. Williams writes chronic pain, single motherhood, and desire with equal honesty. A Reese's pick that earned the hype.
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Five years after losing her husband, artist Feyi is ready to feel something again, and a summer invitation to a tropical island delivers far more than she planned. Lush, grown, and unafraid of complication. Romance with the volume turned all the way up.
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