Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists: Black Stories

Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings--moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's 'long war on black people,' or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police.
(Description from catalog)

This memoir examines a Black family's pursuit of the American Dream, exploring generational trauma from slavery and systemic racism, revealing how racial violence shaped their lives, and uncovering the emotional toll and resilience passed down through generations.
(Description from NoveList)

Montero follows the trail of the massive wealth amassed from the transatlantic slave trade by Northern corporations in America. It has long been maintained by many that the North wasn't complicit in the horrors of slavery, that the forced bondage and exploitation of Black people was primarily a Southern phenomenon.
(Description from NoveList)

In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the U.S. from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon. That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates' direct descendants.
(Description from catalog)

Written with her characteristic tenderness and imaginative genius, a National Book Award-winning author weaves Tubman's life into the fabric of her world, probing the ecological reality of Tubman's surroundings and examining her kindship with other enslaved women, revealing a story of powerful inspiration for our own time of troubles.
(Description from NoveList)

Tracing the legacy of slavery to the treatment of Black people's bodies and minds in our current healthcare system, a Peabody and Emmy award-winning journalist tells the 93-year-old history of Crownsville Hospital, one of the nation's last segregated asylums.
(Description from NoveList)

Montgomery explores the ways trees are intertwined with Black history and culture. Combining science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.
(Description from NoveList)

A landmark biography that reclaims Ella Fitzgerald as a major American artist and modernist innovator.
(Description from catalog)

I Curse You With Joy is Tiffany Haddish unfiltered. These essays lay it all bare, bringing readers into Tiffany's inner circle where joy, honesty, humor, and heart are the order of the day.
(Description from catalog)

A collection of biographical essays on gender, sexuality, race, beauty, Hollywood and the realities of modern women also shares the author's wrenching experiences as a survivor of sexual assault.
(Description from catalog)

Noah's path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother, at the time such a union was punishable by five years in prison. As he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist, his mother is determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.
(Description from catalog)

The Road Is Good is a memoir of Black immigrant identity, the coming-of-age story of Nigerian American actress Uzo Aduba, one of the stars of the television series Orange is the New Black.
(Description from catalog)

The historian embarks on a personal journey to uncover his ancestry, revealing the intertwined narratives of his family's history, which includes both slaveholding white families and an up-from-slavery Black lineage, illuminating the complexities of race, equity and legacy in America.
(Description from NoveList)

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least.
(Description from NoveList)

Loretta Thurwar and Hamara "Hurricane Staxxx" Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America's increasingly dominant private prison industry. It's the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer.
(Description from catalog)

A woman working as an assistant to an octogenarian billionaire in the process of giving away his huge fortune fights the seduction of money.
(Description from NoveList)

Follows four generations of the Montrose family, who have been living with a curse that leaves any person they fall in love with dead, stemming back to a Voodoo sorceress in 1950s New Orleans' French Quarter.
(Description from catalog)

Years after a breakdown and a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder derailed her historical preservationist career, Kenetria Nash and her alters have been given a second chance they can’t refuse: a position as resident caretaker of a historic home. Having been dormant for years, Ken has no idea what led them to this isolated Hudson River island, but she’s determined not to ruin their opportunity. Then a surprise visit from the home’s conservation trust just as a Nor’easter bears down on the island disrupts her newfound life, leaving Ken trapped with a group of strangers. (Description from NoveList)

When eldest son Roman Carruthers is summoned home to Jefferson Run, Virginia after his father’s car accident, he finds his younger brother, Dante, in debt to dangerous criminals and his sister, Neveah, exhausted from holding the family—and the family crematorium business—together. Neveah and their father see death up close every day. But mortality draws even closer when it becomes clear that the crash that landed their father in a coma was no accident and Dante’s recklessness has placed them all in real danger.
(Description from NoveList)

When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator's idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he'll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States first Black president. Great Expectations is about David's eighteen months working for the Senator's presidential campaign. Along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions-questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood, all of which force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America.
(Description from catalog)

Long estranged after being adopted into different families, twin sisters Clara and Dempsey encounter a woman identical to their vanished mother who seems to have lived a childless life, and their opposing views on her true identity push them toward a confrontation.
(Description from NoveList)

Maame (ma-meh) has many meanings in Twi but in my case, it means woman. It's fair to say that Maddie's life in London is far from rewarding. With a mother who spends most of her time in Ghana (yet still somehow manages to be overbearing), Maddie is the primary caretaker for her father, who suffers from advanced stage Parkinson's. At work, her boss is a nightmare and Maddie is tired of always being the only Black person in every meeting. When her mum returns from her latest trip to Ghana, Maddie leaps at the chance to get out of the family home and finally start living.
(Description from catalog)

Twenty-six-year-old editorial assistant Nella Rogers is tired of being the only Black employee at Wagner Books. Fed up with the isolation and microaggressions, she's thrilled when Harlem-born and bred Hazel starts working in the cubicle beside hers. When a string of uncomfortable events elevates Hazel to Office Darling, and Nella is left in the dust, the notes begin to appear on Nella's desk: LEAVE WAGNER. NOW. It's hard to believe Hazel is behind these hostile messages. But as Nella starts to spiral and obsess over the sinister forces at play, she soon realizes that there's a lot more at stake than just her career.
(Description from catalog)

Emerging from a life-threatening illness, a fiercely organized but unfulfilled computer geek recruits a mysterious artist to help her establish meaning in her life, before finding herself engaged in reckless but thrilling activities. (Description from NoveList.)

A maid to Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lizzie McDuffie, whose husband is FDR's personal valet, becomes the President's eyes and ears into the Black community, advocating for the needs and rights of her fellow African Americans when those in the White House blocked access to the President.
(Description from NoveList)

Detective King Oliver fulfills his grandmother’s dying wish to reunite with his estranged father while also protecting a missing woman and her daughter from a powerful billionaire, in the third novel of the series following Every Man a King.
(Description from NoveList)

After being fired and facing yet another novel rejection, aspiring author Zelu writes a futuristic epic about AI and robots, unknowingly setting herself on a path to literary stardom that could change the future of humanity.
(Description from NoveList)

When Nikki visits her estranged grandmother in Western North Carolina, she uncovers a hidden legacy tied to a forgotten kingdom of freed people, unraveling her family’s secrets and her own identity while fighting to protect their endangered heritage.
(Description from NoveList)

Curtis Wilson, a cello prodigy from D.C. who rose to classical music stardom, is forced into witness protection after his drug-dealer father turns informant, but when the cartel remains untouchable, Curtis and his family must use their wits and his musical gifts to fight for survival.
(Description from NoveList)

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.
(Description from Amazon)

Ebby Freeman's life unravels when her brother is killed and a centuries-old family heirloom is shattered but years later, while fleeing a public breakup, she uncovers how that lost, shattered jar may hold secrets to her future.
(Description from NoveList)

Moving their family to the planned Black utopia of Liberty, California, hope to find a community of like-minded people, Jasmyn, perplexed and frustrated by most residents' outlook, discovers a terrible secret about Liberty and its founders and must save her loved ones from embracing the Liberty way of life.--Description by NoveList

The first in a graphic novel trilogy based on the life of civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis. (Description from catalog.)

On its one-hundredth anniversary, a powerful and essential meditation on the origins, evolution, and future of Black History Month from one of America’s leading historians of Black education and the author of American Grammar.
(Description from NoveList)

Recounts six criminal cases in one Virginia county in the years preceding the Civil War. Witnesses of both races describe a startling variety of encounters between white and Black that reconfigures the binary terrain of master-slave relations.
(Description from NoveList)