We are half way through 2020 and the world is burning. An introduction seems unnecessary in these times. This is a compilation of some of the best books published by black authors in 2020. Most of the titles mentioned here are published in the first half of the year and some in the latter half.
Excellent nonfiction books—that I’ve been hearing about—published this year include Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall about black feminism, Racism by Jason Reynolds about racism constructs. I would suggest looking up on other lists to add nonfiction too in your reading list. This reading list is all-fiction and by no means a definitive list. Read for debut novels, short stories, YA books by black authors, romance, fantasy and literary fiction published this year.
Debut books by Black Authors in 2020
Debut novels are always thrilling to read. The premises of these novels are mind blowing. Among the ones I’ve read, I thoroughly enjoyed Such a Fun Age and Luster. Needless to say, I want to read them all.
1. Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
A black babysitter is accused of kidnapping the child of a white rich family. Kiley Reid delves into casual racism with her white blogger-influencer vs young, black employee. There are manipulations, viral videos, privileged talk and wit in this debut. One of my best reads this year.
Read : Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age is one of the most entertaining debuts of 2020
2. Lakewood by Megan Giddings
When a debt-ridden black woman gets a new, high paying job, little does she realise it has to do with medical experimentation. She can climb heights if she lies to her friends and family. Here eyedrops can turn brown eyes blue, and pills can make your bad memories disappear.
3. Luster by Raven Leilani
One of my best reads of the year. The characters in Leilani’s Luster are haunting. A young, black woman with a string of bad sexual choices is wedged in the open marriage of a suburban white couple. There’s more—the couple have an adopted black child. Highly recommended.
4. Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Wallace is an introvert and a PhD scholar in a mid-western university. “But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.” This is a novel I want to pick up soon. My Twitter is filled with praises for Brandon Taylor and I am positive—because I love his essays—that Real Life is a fantastic read.
Buy | Goodreads
5. Rainbow Milk by Paul Mendez
A young black, gay, Jehovah Witness man flees his community to London “and turns to sex work to create new notions of love, fatherhood and spirituality.” Marlon James calls this “the novel you never knew you were waiting for.”
Buy | Goodreads
6. Black Sunday by Tola Rotimi Abraham
Set over two decades in Nigeria, Black Sunday is the story of twins, Bibike and Ariyike. When their father gambles away the house, the marriage between their parents crumbles. “This is a novel about two young women slowly finding, over twenty years, in a place rife with hypocrisy but also endless life and love, their own distinct methods of resistance and paths to independence.”
Buy | Goodreads
8. You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson
Liz has always believed she is too black and too poor. She hopes to get into the elite Pennington college and become a doctor. But when her financial aid falls through, she aims to bag the school scholarship for the prom queen.
Goodreads
9. The Black Kids by Christina Hammonds Reed
A YA novel that “explores issues of race, class, and violence through the eyes of a wealthy black teenager whose family gets caught in the vortex of the 1992 Rodney King Riots.”
Buy | Goodreads
10. Everywhere you Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump
Claude is an average guy raised in Chicago. When the riots happen in his neighbourhood, he hesitates from taking a side so as not to let race define his life but he realises soon enough that “America is no safe haven for a young black man.
11. Black Girl Unlimited by Echo Brown
A wizard from the East side with an alcoholic father and drug addicted mother transfers to a rich school in the West Side. New portals begin to open. This memoir infused with magical realism “explores the intersections of poverty, sexual violence, depression, racism, and sexism—all through the arc of a transcendent coming-of-age”
Buy | Goodreads
12. The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna
A high fantasy novel set in a patriarchal village where every girl has to perform a blood ceremony. If the blood is red, she is pure and can become a member of the village. But when Deka’s blood runs golden, she has to choose between her fate or running to join an army of nera-immortals and fight for the emperor. This book gives me very Children of Blood and Bone vibes.
Goodreads
Read : Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi is about bringing magic back
13. A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseann Brown
A West African inspired fantasy. Malik wants to escape his poverty-stricken town and start a new life in the prosperous city of Ziran. He strikes a deal with a vengeful spirit to kill Crown Princess of Ziran, Karina, in exchange for his sister who was abducted by the spirit for passage into the city. Karina, meanwhile tries to resurrect her assassinated mother, the Sultana, through ancient magic.
Buy | Goodreads
14. Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
For the dark academia fans. This debut is gothic styled university novel where admissions are very tricky and students who are accepted need to stay for three years, removed from the family and outside world.
Buy | Goodreads
15. Remembrance by Rita Woods
A historical novel about three women, told through three timelines—present day Ohio, 1791 Haiti and 1857 New Orleans.
Goodreads
16. The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré
A 14-year-old Nigerian girl trapped in servitude longs for education to get a ‘louding voice’ that is the voice to be heard and make her own choices.
Buy | Goodreads. This has gotten rave reviews from fellow readers and I am very keen to pick a copy.
17. The Sound of Stars by Alechia Dow
After an Ilori (alien) invasion in New York, all forms of creative expression like art, books and music are banned. A black girl runs a secret library that can get her killed. An Ilori alien, raised to be emotionless, finds himself drawn to music. “Can a girl who risks her life for books and an alien who loves forbidden pop music work together to save humanity?”
Goodreads
More books by Black authors in 2020
This section is a jumble. There’s literary fiction, romance, YA books and everything else.
18. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
The Vignes twins run away from home and lead different lives. One raises a black kid. The other lives as a white woman. Having read Bennett’s Mothers, I am curious to see what she offers next.
Read : Mothers by Brit Bennett isa about scandals in small town America
19. The Death of Vivek Oji by Awkaweke Emezi
Vivek Oji is raised by a distant father and over protective mother but has his bouts of sadness and emotional crisis. This is “the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious”. The Death of Vivek Oji is one of my most anticipated books by black authors in 2020.
20. These Ghosts Are Family by Maisy Card
These Ghosts Are Family explores and illuminates the complexities of race and lineage in Jamaica and the United States.” There are fake deaths, stolen identities and secrets.
Goodreads
21. Transcendant Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
I loved Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, a historic family epic in 300 pages. Her new novel Transcendent Kingdom “is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanain immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief–a novel about faith, science, religion, love.”
Goodreads
Read : Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is an ambitious debut in 300 pages
22. Felix Ever After by Kacen Kallender
Felix is black, queer, and transgender. He fears he is too marginalized for a happily-ever-after. “When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages—after publicly posting Felix’s deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned—Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn’t count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi–love triangle”
Goodreads
23. The City We Became by N. K. Jemisin
The first book in Great City series. Five New Yorkers must come together and defend their city from an ancient power stirring beneath.
Buy | Goodreads
24. Riot Baby by Tochi Onyebuchi
Ella has the power of seeing the future. “When her brother, Kev, is incarcerated for the crime of being a young black man in America, she—through visits both mundane and supernatural—tries to show him the way to a revolution that could burn it all down.”
Buy | Goodreads
25. Ikenga by Nnedi Okorafor
Twelve year old Nnamdi wants to avenge his father’s death. He is believed to be killed by the most powerful criminal in the city. But then Nnamdi has some newfound powers which might aid his mission.
Buy | Goodreads
26. Party of Two by Jasmine Guillory
Olivia who owns a law firm and Max, a hotshot junior senator find themselves on clandestine dates and disguised meet ups. But when they go public, the media is set to dig her past and debate her suitability as a trophy girlfriend.
27. The Boyfriend Project by Farrah Rochon
In a live tweet of a date incident that goes viral, Samiah realises that she has been catfished by her three-timing boyfriend. The three women become best friends and vow to focus on themselves. But a new work colleague, the handsome Daniel, might spoil her plans.
28. Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert
When a security guard, Zafir Ansari, heroically saves the PhD student, Dani, from a workplace drill go wrong, they go viral on the internet. They agree to fake date for a while.
29. Ties that Tether by Jane Igharo
Azere has promised her father that she will only marry a Nigerian man. But when a one night stand with a white man grows into something more series, she wonders if the romance makes her any less Nigerian.
Buy | Goodreads
30. It’s Not All Downhill from Here by Terry McMillan
Loretha Curry is 68 years old and bent on proving to her mother and twin sister that age is a mere number. She has “a booming beauty supply empire, a gaggle of lifelong friends, and a husband who’s still got moves that surprise.” But an unexpected loss breaks her world.
Goodreads
31. The Only Black Girls in Town by Brandy Colber
A middle grade novel “about the only two black girls in town who discover a collection of hidden journals revealing shocking secrets of the past.”
Goodreads
32. Every Body Looking by Candice Iloh
Every Body Looking is a heavily autobiographical novel told in verse. It is about childhood memories, abuse, Ada’s mother’s “decent into addiction and her father’s attempts to create a home for his American daughter more like the one he knew in Nigeria.”
Goodreads
33. Saving Savannah by Tonya Bolden
Savannah, the daughter of an upper class African American family in Washington D.C. meets Nell, a working-class girl who introduces her to the suffragette and socialist movements, inspiring her to fight for a change.
Goodreads
34. Dear Justyce by Nic Stone
An incarcerated Quan writes letters to Justyce (protagonist of Stone’s Dear Martin). The novel “takes an unflinching look at the flawed practices and ideologies that discriminate against African American boys and minorities in the American justice system.”
Buy | Goodreads
35. Deacon King Kong by James Mc Bride
A cranky old deacon, Sportcoat, opens gunfire at a drug dealer. In 1960s New York, “McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood’s Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.”
36. Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
Separated by distance (Dominican Republic and America) and a man’s secrets, “two girls are forced to face a new reality in which their father is dead and their lives are forever altered”.
Short Story Books by Black Authors in 2020
Short stories are always lovely to keep on the bedside. Quick reads, I call them. Here are a few books written or edited by black authors and published this year.
37. Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston
With a foreward by Tayari Jones, this collection includes stories “about love and migration, gender and class, racism and sexism that proudly reflect African American folk culture.” It also includes eight Harlem stories that were found in periodicals and archives
38. So We can Glow by Leesa Cross-Smith
“From Kentucky to the California desert, these forty-two short stories expose the glossy and matte hearts of girls and women in moments of obsessive desire and fantasy, wildness and bad behavior, brokenness and fearlessness.”
39. The Secret Life of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw
“The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church’s double standards and their own needs and passions”
40. A Phoenix First Must Burn Edited by Patrice Caldwell
Sixteen stories of black girl magic, resistance and hope. Authors include Elizabeth Acevedo, Charlotte Davis, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Ashley Woodfolk, Ibi Zoboi and more. Through witches, scientists, A Phoenix First Must Burn will take you on a journey from folktales retold to futuristic societies and everything in between.
40 books by black authors to read in 2020 #supportblackauthors Click To Tweet
Pin this list of Black Authors to read in 2020 for later
Update : This list has been edited because one of the authors mentioned was not black. Said book and author (#7) have been removed from the list. (Thank you Abbie Weil for bringing this to my attention)
What a great list. I’ve only read a couple of these and will be adding a few to my wish list for sure.
I hope you love the ones you pick. I had aimed for 20 in a list but ended up with 40 books