Conjure Women
by Afia Atakora
F ATA

A midwife and conjurer of curses reflects on her life before and after the Civil War, her relationships with the families she serves and the secrets she has learned about a plantation owner’s daughter.

The Hundred Wells of Salaga
by Ayesha Harruna Attah
F ATT

Based on true events, a story of courage, forgiveness, love, and freedom in pre-colonial Ghana, told through the eyes of two women born to vastly different fates. Through their experiences The Hundred Wells of Salaga offers a remarkable view of slavery and how the scramble for Africa affected the lives of everyday people.

The Water Dancer
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
F COA

A Virginia slave narrowly escapes a drowning death through the intervention of a mysterious force that compels his escape and personal underground war against slavery. 

The Confessions of Frannie Langton
by Sara Collins
F COL

A servant and former slave enduring a sensational trial for her employers' murders reflects on her Jamaican childhood and her apprenticeship under a debauched scientist whose questionable ethics set the stage for a forbidden affair.

Africaville
by Jeffrey Colvin
F COL

Three generations of a family of former slaves, the founders of a small Nova Scotia community, navigate prejudice, harsh weather and estrangements against a backdrop of the historical events of the 20th century.

Washington Black
by Esi Edugyan
F EDU

Unexpectedly chosen to be a family manservant, an 11-year-old Barbados sugar-plantation slave is initiated into a world of technology and dignity before a devastating betrayal propels him throughout the world in search of his true self.

Homegoing
by Yaa Gyasi
F GYA

Two half-sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations marked by wealth, slavery, war, coal mining, the Great Migration and the realities of 20th-century Harlem.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie
by Ayana Mathis
F MAT

Traces the story of Great Migration-era mother Hattie Shepherd, who in spite of poverty and a dysfunctional husband uses love and Southern remedies to raise nine children and prepare them for the realities of a harsh world. A first novel. Reprint.

Deacon King Kong
by James McBride
F MCB

In the aftermath of a 1969 Brooklyn church deacon’s public shooting of a local drug dealer, the community’s African-American and Latinx witnesses find unexpected support from each other when they are targeted by violent mobsters.

The Good Lord Bird
by James McBride
F MCB

Fleeing her violent master at the side of legendary abolitionist John Brown at the height of the slavery debate in mid-19th-century Kansas Territory, Henry pretends to be a girl to hide his identity throughout the historic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.

Lazaretto
by Diane McKinney-Whetstone
F MCK

In the aftermath of the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination, the black live-in staff at the Lazaretto quarantine hospital—the first stop for immigrants who wish to begin new lives in Philadelphia—find the wedding preparations for one of their own marred by a shooting and its aftermath.

The Shadow King
by Maaza Mengiste
F MEN

Tending the wounded when her nation is invaded by Mussolini, an orphaned servant in 1935 Ethiopia helps disguise a gentle peasant as their exiled emperor to rally her fellow women in the fight against fascism.

She Would Be King
by Wayétu Moore
F MOO

Reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond.

Balm
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
F PER

At the end of the Civil War, Madge, who has the power to heal; Sadie, who can commune with the dead; and Hemp, who is searching for his family, arrive in Chicago where they are all caught up in a desperate battle for survival in a community desperate to lay the pain of the past to rest.

The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead
F WHI

A follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning, The Underground Railroad, follows the harrowing experiences of two African-American teens at an abusive reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

The Underground Railroad
by Colson Whitehead
F WHI

After Cora, a slave in pre-Civil War Georgia, escapes with another slave, Caesar, they seek the help of the Underground Railroad as they flee from state to state and try to evade a slave catcher, Ridgeway, who is determined to return them to the South.

American Spy
by Lauren Wilkinson
 F WIL

A Cold War FBI intelligence officer joins an undercover task force to seduce a revolutionary African Communist president she secretly admires and comes to love, in a story inspired by true events.

In West Mills
by De'Shawn Charles Winslow
F WIN

A woman in mid-20th-century rural North Carolina, determined to live on her own terms in spite of community gossip, finds unexpected support from a veteran fixer who struggles with an inability to correct his own troubled past.