Black Voices in Fiction and Poetry
See these fiction selections and more displayed in the library lobby. To request titles and find new books, check out the NMC library catalog.
Title: Girl, Woman, Other
Author: Bernardine Evaristo
Girl, Woman, Other is a celebration of the diversity of Black British experience. Moving, hopeful, and inventive, this extraordinary novel is a vivid portrait of the state of contemporary Britain and the legacy of Britain’s colonial history in Africa and the Caribbean. Sparklingly witty and written in an innovative and fast-moving form, Girl, Woman, Other is a richly textured novel that reminds us of everything that connects us to our neighbors, even in times when we are encouraged to be split apart.
Title: Sing, Unburied, Sing
Author: Jesmyn Ward
In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings “the road” novel into rural twenty-first-century America. An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing grapples with the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power, and limitations, of the bonds of family. Rich with distinctive, musical language, Sing, Unburied, Sing is a majestic new work and an essential contribution to American literature.
Title: The Vanishing Half
Author: Brit Bennett
The Vignes twin sisters grew up in a small, southern black community and ran away at age sixteen. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white. Weaving together multiple strands and generations from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that looks well beyond issues of race, offering an engrossing page-turner about family and relationships that is provocative, compassionate and wise.
Title: An Orchestra of Minorities
Author: Chigozie Obioma
Set in Nigeria, and narrated by a chi, or guardian spirit, An Orchestra of Minorities tells the story of Chinonso, a young farmer whose soul is ignited when he sees a woman, Ndali, attempting to jump from a bridge. Bonded by this incident, Chinonso and Ndali fall in love. Spanning continents, traversing the earth and cosmic spaces, and told by a narrator who has lived for hundreds of years, this novel is a contemporary twist on Homer’s Odyssey. Writing in the mythic style of the Igbo literary tradition, Chigozie Obioma weaves a heart-wrenching epic about destiny and determination.
Title: God Help the Child
Author: Toni Morrison
At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, but which caused her light-skinned mother to deny her even the simplest forms of love. There is Booker, the man Bride loves, and loses to anger. Rain, the mysterious white child with whom she crosses paths. And finally, Bride’s mother herself, Sweetness, who takes a lifetime to come to understand that “what you do to children matters. And they might never forget.” A fiery and provocative novel, God Help the Child weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and mis-shape, the life of the adult.
Title: How Long ’til Black Future Month?
Author: N. K. Jemisin
How Long ’til Black Future Month? is a collection of science fiction and fantasy short stories by American novelist N. K. Jemisin. Spirits haunt the flooded streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a parallel universe, a utopian society watches our world, trying to learn from our mistakes. A black mother in the Jim Crow South must save her daughter from a fey offering impossible promises. And in the Hugo award-nominated short story “The City Born Great,” a young street kid fights to give birth to an old metropolis’s soul.
Title: What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
Author: Helen Oyeyemi.
The stories collected here are linked by a cast of characters who slip from the pages of their own stories only to surface in another. The reader is invited into a world of lost libraries and locked gardens, of marshlands where the drowned dead live and a city where all the clocks have stopped; students hone their skills at puppet school, and the Homely Wench Society commits a guerrilla book-swap. It is a collection of towering imagination, marked by baroque beauty and a deep sensuousness.
Title: American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Author: Terrance Hayes
A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America’s most acclaimed poets and National Book Award winning author, Terrance Hayes. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the country’s past and future eras and errors, its dreams and nightmares. Inventive, compassionate, hilarious, melancholy, and bewildered–the wonders of this new collection are irreducible and stunning.
Title: Black Leopard, Red Wolf
Author: Marlon James
The epic novel, an African Game of Thrones. In the stunning first novel in Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child. Drawing from African history and mythology and his own rich imagination, Marlon James has written a novel unlike anything that’s come before it: a saga of breathtaking adventure full of unforgettable characters. Black Leopard, Red Wolf explores the fundamentals of truth, the limits of power, and our need to understand them both.