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My favorite Books by African & African-American Authors

If you have been following me for a while, you already know I am OBSESSED with African and African American literature. I think it started after I graduated college and I read Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie. I fell in love with the story, and I don’t think I had ever read a book where I could actually really relate to the character on a very personal level. After reading that, I decided I HAD to read all of her other novels, and so I did and enjoyed every single one of them. I then started exploring other African authors such as Yejide Kilanko’s Daughters who walk this path and Ernessa Carter’s 32 candles, two of my favorite books to date.

Because of my long commute to work(no longer long after we moved), I was able to go through between two to four books a month through the audible app on my phone. I honestly would look forward to my rides to and from work (mostly from lol) because that’s when I got the opportunity to catch up on whatever story I was engrossed in at the time. Sometimes I would find myself sitting in my drive-through for an extra 10 or 20 minutes not wanting my storytime to end lol.

This is LONG LONG overdue, but I thought it honor of black history month, I should share with you all some of my favorite books by black authors. I hope you enjoy my list below, and please PLEASE share some of your favorites in the comments! This list is not in any particular order, and they are all on audible!

Books by African Authors

  • Purple Hibiscus
    • Available on Amazon: $9.98
    • https://amzn.to/2wfDFrZ
    • Fifteen-year-old Kambili’s world is circumscribed by the high walls and frangipani trees of her family compound. Her wealthy Catholic father, under whose shadow Kambili lives, while generous and politically active in the community, is repressive and fanatically religious at home. When Nigeria begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili’s father sends her and her brother away to stay with their aunt, a University professor, whose house is noisy and full of laughter. There, Kambili and her brother discover a life and love beyond the confines of their father’s authority. The visit will lift the silence from their world and, in time, give rise to devotion and defiance that reveal themselves in profound and unexpected ways. This is a book about the promise of freedom; about the blurred lines between childhood and adulthood; between love and hatred; between the old gods and the new.
  • Half of a Yellow Sun
    • Available on Amazon: $13.02
    • https://amzn.to/321ffhL
    • Summary: The novel takes place in Nigeria prior to and during the Nigerian Civil War (1967–70). The effect of the war is shown through the dynamic relationships of five people’s lives including the twin daughters of an influential businessman, a professor, a British citizen, and a Nigerian houseboy. After Biafra’s declaration of secession, the lives of the main characters drastically change and are torn apart by the brutality of the civil war and decisions in their personal lives.
  • Americanah
    • Available on Amazon: $7.79
    • https://amzn.to/2UXPVYo
    • A powerful, tender story of race and identity by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the award-winning author of Half of a Yellow Sun. Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. Fifteen years later, they reunite in a newly democratic Nigeria, and reignite their passion—for each other and for their homeland.
  • The Thing around your neck
    • Available on Amazon: $10.99
    • https://amzn.to/38Dtw6Q
    • In The Thing Around Your Neck (published in 2009); Adichie turns her penetrating eye on not only Nigeria but also America, in twelve dazzling stories that explore the ties that bind men and women, parents and children, Africa and the United States.
    • “Cell One” in which a spoilt brother and son of a professor is sent to a Nigerian prison and ends up in the infamous Cell One.
    • “Imitation” is set in Philadelphia and concerns Nkem, a young mother whose art-dealer husband visits only 2 months a year. She finds out that his lover has moved into their Lagos home.
    • “A Private Experience” in which two women caught up in a riot between Christians and Muslims take refuge in an abandoned shop. This story highlighted the friendliness and peace between two women with different religions. It is told in a third person’s narrative so that the readers are put in an omniscient position to understand this idea.
    • “Ghosts” a retired university professor looks back on his life.
    • “On Monday of Last Week” Kamara, a Nigerian woman who has joined her husband in America takes a job as a nanny to an upper-class family and becomes obsessed with the mother.
    • “Jumping Monkey Hill” is the most autobiographical story; it is set in Cape Town at a writers’ retreat where authors from all over Africa gather and tells of the conflicts experienced by the young Nigerian narrator.
    • “The Thing Around Your Neck” a woman named Akunna gains a sought-after American visa and goes to live with her uncle, but he molests her and she ends up working as a waitress in Connecticut.
    • “The American Embassy” a woman applies for asylum but ends up walking away, unwilling to describe her son’s murder for the sake of a visa.
    • “The Shivering“, set on the campus of Princeton University it concerns a Catholic Nigerian woman whose boyfriend has left her, finding solace in the earnest prayers of a stranger who knocks at her door.
    • “The Arrangers of Marriage” a newly married wife arrives in New York City with her husband and finds she is unable to accept his rejection of their Nigerian identity.
    • “Tomorrow Is Too Far” a young woman reveals the devastating secret of her brother’s death.
    • “The Headstrong Historian” covers the life-story of a woman called Nwangba, who believes her husband was killed by his cousins and is determined to regain the inheritance for her son through his education by missionaries. Though her son didn’t realize what she hoped, her granddaughter managed to retrieve it, highlighting the significance of holding one’s past and one’s origin in order to thrive in the future.
  • Daughters who walk this path- Yejide Kilanko
    • SOLD OUT (Audiobook available on Amazon)- $11.95
      • Spirited and intelligent, Morayo grows up surrounded by school friends and family in busy, modern-day Ibadan. An adoring little sister, their traditional parents, and a host of aunties and cousins make Morayo’s home their own. So there’s nothing unusual about her charming but troubled cousin Bros T moving in with the family. At first, Morayo and her sister are delighted, but in her innocence, nothing prepares Morayo for the shameful secret Bros T forces upon her. Thrust into a web of oppressive silence woven by the adults around her, Morayo must learn to protect herself and her sister from a legacy of silence shared by the women in her family. Only her Aunt Morenike provides Morayo with a safe home and a sense of female community that sustains her as she develops into a young woman in a bustling, politically charged, often violent Nigeria.
  • Children of blood and bone: Tomi Adeyemi
    • Available on Amazon: $10.43
    • https://amzn.to/37Ay8cq
    • Summary: Tomi Adeyemi conjures a stunning world of dark magic and danger in her West African-inspired fantasy debut. They killed my mother. They took our magic. They tried to bury us. Now we rise. Zélie Adebola remembers when the soil of Orïsha hummed with magic. Burners ignited flames, Tiders beckoned waves, and Zélie’s Reaper mother summoned forth souls. But everything changed the night magic disappeared. Under the orders of a ruthless king, maji were killed, leaving Zélie without a mother and her people without hope. Now Zélie has one chance to bring back magic and strike against the monarchy. With the help of a rogue princess, Zélie must outwit and outrun the crown prince, who is hell-bent on eradicating magic for good. Danger lurks in Orïsha, where snow leoponaires prowl and vengeful spirits wait in the waters. Yet the greatest danger may be Zélie herself as she struggles to control her powers—and her growing feelings for an enemy.
  • Children of Virtue and Vengeance: Tomi Adeyemi
    • Available on Amazon: $11.99
    • https://amzn.to/2SUySns
      • Summary: After battling the impossible, Zélie and Amari have finally succeeded in bringing magic back to the land of Orïsha. But the ritual was more powerful than they could’ve imagined, reigniting the powers of not only the maji, but of nobles with magic ancestry, too. Now, Zélie struggles to unite the maji in an Orïsha where the enemy is just as powerful as they are. But when the monarchy and military unite to keep control of Orïsha, Zélie must fight to secure Amari’s right to the throne and protect the new maji from the monarchy’s wrath. With civil war looming on the horizon, Zélie finds herself at a breaking point: she must discover a way to bring the kingdom together or watch as Orïsha tears itself apart. 
  • Homegoing Yaa Gyasi
    • Available on Amazon: $11.04
    • https://amzn.to/37yKnWU
    • Ghana, eighteenth century: two half sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.
  • Born a Crime
    • Available on Amazon: $8.99 
    • https://amzn.to/37CAyY1
    • In this award-winning Audible Studios production, Trevor Noah tells his wild coming-of-age tale during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa. It’s a story that begins with his mother throwing him from a moving van to save him from a potentially fatal dispute with gangsters, then follows the budding comedian’s path to self-discovery through episodes both poignant and comical. Noah’s virtuoso embodiment of all the characters from his childhood, and his ability to perform accents and dialects effortlessly in English, Xhosa, and Zulu, garnered the Audie Award for Best Male Narrator in 2018. Nevertheless, Noah’s devoted and uncompromising mother-as voiced by her son-steals the show.
  • Stay With me- Ayobami Adebayo
    • Available on amazon: $12.39
    • https://amzn.to/2u5r75Z
    • Ilesa, Nigeria. Ever since they first met and fell in love at university, Yejide and Akin have agreed: polygamy is not for them. But four years into their marriage—after consulting fertility doctors and healers, and trying strange teas and unlikely cures—Yejide is still not pregnant. She assumes she still has time—until her in-laws arrive on her doorstep with a young woman they introduce as Akin’s second wife. Furious, shocked, and livid with jealousy, Yejide knows the only way to save her marriage is to get pregnant. Which, finally, she does—but at a cost far greater than she could have dared to imagine. The unforgettable story of a marriage as seen through the eyes of both husband and wife, Stay With Me asks how much we can sacrifice for the sake of family.
  • No Longer at ease
    • Chinua Achebe
    • Available on Amazon: $9.88
    • https://amzn.to/2vHM9bm
    • Summary: A classic story of moral struggle in an age of turbulent social change and the final book in Chinua Achebe’s The African Trilogy. When Obi Okonkwo, grandson of Okonkwo, the main character in Things Fall Apart returns to Nigeria from England in the 1950s, his foreign education separates him from his African roots. No Longer at Ease, the third and concluding novel in Chinua Achebe’s The African Trilogy depicts the uncertainties that beset the nation of Nigeria, as independence from colonial rule loomed near. In Obi Okonkwo’s experiences, the ambiguities, pitfalls, and temptations of a rapidly evolving society are revealed. He is part of a ruling Nigerian elite whose corruption he finds repugnant. His fate, however, overtakes him as he finds himself trapped between the expectation of his family, his village—both representations of the traditional world of his ancestors—and the colonial world.  A story of a man lost in cultural limbo, and a nation entering a new age of disillusionment, No Longer at Ease is a powerful metaphor for his generation of young
  • We need New Names:
    • Noviolet Bulawayo
    • Available on Amazon: $11.69A remarkable literary debut shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize: the unflinching and powerful story of a young girl’s journey out of Zimbabwe and to America. Darling is only ten years old, and yet she must navigate a fragile and violent world. In Zimbabwe, Darling and her friends steal guavas, try to get the baby out of young Chipo’s belly, and grasp at memories of Before. Before their homes were destroyed by paramilitary policemen, before the school closed, before the fathers left for dangerous jobs abroad. But Darling has a chance to escape: she has an aunt in America. She travels to this new land in search of America’s famous abundance only to find that her options as an immigrant are perilously few. NoViolet Bulawayo’s debut calls to mind the great storytellers of displacement and arrival who have come before her — from Junot Diaz to Zadie Smith to J.M. Coetzee — while she tells a vivid, raw story all her own.

Books by African American Authors

  • Outliers-Malcolm Gladwell
    • Available on Amazon: $7.79
    • https://amzn.to/39DcHZQ
    • In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”–the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
  • 32 Candles Ernessa T Carter
    • Available on Amazon: $12.43
    • https://amzn.to/38zXWXE
    • Candles by exciting newcomer Ernessa T. Carter is the slightly twisted, utterly romantic, and deftly wry story of Davie Jones, who, if she doesn’t stand in her own way, just might get the man of her dreams.  For fans of John Hughes’s “Sixteen Candles”, 32 Candles is a fresh and fun fiction debut for every fan of romantic comedy.
  • God Don’t like Ugly Series- 6 books
    • God Don’t like Ugly
    • Available on Amazon: $26.69
    • https://amzn.to/2SNG7hb
    • In her richly drawn debut novel, Mary Monroe brings to life the bond between two girls from opposite sides of the track—and the shattering event that changes their lives forever. At the heart of the story is Annette Goode, a shy, awkward, overweight child who keeps a terrible secret. Mr. Boatwright, the boarder her hardworking mother has taken in, abuses her daily. Frightened and ashamed, Annette withdraws into a world of books and food. But the summer Annette turns thirteen, something incredible happens: Rhoda Nelson chooses her as a friend. Dazzling, generous Rhoda, who is everything Annette is not—gorgeous, slim, and worldly—welcomes Annette into the heart of her eccentric family, which includes her handsome and dignified father; her lovely, fragile, “Muh’Dear;” her brooding, dangerous brother Jock; and her colorful white relatives—half-crazy Uncle Johnny, sultry Aunt Lola, and scary, surly Granny Goose. With Rhoda’s help, Annette survives adolescence and blossoms as a woman. But when her beautiful best friend makes a stunning confession about a horrific childhood crime, Annette’s world will never be the same.
    • God still Don’t like Ugly
    • God Don’t play
    • God Ain’t blind
    • God Ain’t Through Yet
    • God Don’t make no mistakes
  • Better Than I know myself-
    • Virginia Deberry Donna Grant
    • Available on Amazon:  $18.87
    • https://amzn.to/2u3RGbA
    • The beloved #1 Essence best-selling authors of Tryin’ to Sleep in the Bed You Made now deliver a novel in which you’ll meet their most unforgettable characters yet. Carmen, Jewel, and Regina could not be more different. When they meet as freshmen at Columbia University, they’re pretty confident that a friendship among them isn’t in the cards. Jewel is Hollywood royalty; as the teenage star of the TV show Daddy’s Girl, her face is instantly recognizable all across America. Now, though, she wants two things: to get a serious education and to leave her controlling stage-mother behind. Regina is the definitive upper-middle-class African-American girl. Her picture-perfect parents are what she calls “black Ward and June Cleavers”, and their goals for her are like a stranglehold. No one can see, though, how far Regina’s rebellious side will take her, or how treacherous it will become. Carmen is just trying to get by. A child of the projects whose father is dead and whose mother has vanished, Carmen has been raised by her abusive brother. Columbia is the way for her to get a better life, if she can hold down two jobs and keep her grade point average up
  • A Piece of Cake- Cupcake brown
    • Available on Amazon: $12.00
    • https://amzn.to/2SRaG5n
    • There are shelves of memoirs about overcoming the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, and homelessness. Cupcake Brown survived all these things before she’d even turned twenty. And that’s when things got interesting. . . Orphaned by the death of her mother and left in the hands of a sadistic foster parent, young Cupcake Brown learned to survive by turning tricks, downing hard liquor, and ingesting every drug she could find while hitchhiking up and down the California coast. She stumbled into gangbanging, drug dealing, hustling, prostitution, theft, and, eventually, the best scam of all: a series of 9-to-5 jobs. A Piece of Cake is unlike any memoir you’ll ever read. Moving in its frankness, this is the most satisfying, startlingly funny, and genuinely affecting tour through hell you’ll ever take.
  • White Lines Series: Tracy Brown
    • Available on Amazon: $13.99
    • https://amzn.to/37yNLRZ
    • https://amzn.to/2vAf54R
    • https://amzn.to/3bFPlVb
    • All the books: https://amzn.to/2vJ9Vn1
    • Jada left home at the age of sixteen, running from her own demons and the horrors of physical abuse inflicted by her mother’s boyfriend. She partied hard, and life seemed good when she was with Born, the neighborhood kingpin whose name was synonymous with money, power, and respect. But all his love couldn’t save her from a crack addiction. Jada goes from crack addict and prostitute to survivor and back again before she finds the strength to live for herself and come out on top. And her stormy romance with one of the fiercest hustlers on the streets makes White Lines one of the most unforgettable urban loves stories of the year.
  • Barracoon: The Story of the Las “Black Cargo”- Zora Nealson Hurston 
    • Available on Amazon: $12.19
    • https://amzn.to/37Evhzy
    • In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston went to Plateau, Alabama, just outside Mobile, to interview eighty-six-year-old Cudjo Lewis. Of the millions of men, women, and children transported from Africa to America as slaves, Cudjo was then the only person alive to tell the story of this integral part of the nation’s history. Hurston was there to record Cudjo’s firsthand account of the raid that led to his capture and bondage fifty years after the Atlantic slave trade was outlawed in the United States.
  • Pride
    • Ibi Zoboi
    • Available on Amazon: $7.99
    • https://amzn.to/2vBuORc
      • Summary- Pride and Prejudice gets remixed in this smart, funny, gorgeous retelling of the classic, starring all characters of color, from Ibi Zoboi, National Book Award finalist and author of American Street. Zuri Benitez has pride. Brooklyn pride, family pride, and pride in her Afro-Latino roots. But pride might not be enough to save her rapidly gentrifying neighborhood from becoming unrecognizable. When the wealthy Darcy family moves in across the street, Zuri wants nothing to do with their two teenage sons, even as her older sister, Janae, starts to fall for the charming Ainsley. She especially can’t stand the judgmental and arrogant Darius. Yet as Zuri and Darius are forced to find common ground, their initial dislike shifts into an unexpected understanding.

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