Black History Month is an opportunity to celebrate Black writers, histories, cultures and experiences – but these are books to discover throughout the year. Whether you want to learn more about Black British history, understand the legacies of slavery and empire, discover classic and contemporary Black fiction, or read memoir, poetry and cultural criticism, this reading list offers a place to start.
From Toni Morrison and Nella Larsen to contemporary writers including Brandon Taylor, NoViolet Bulawayo and Jacqueline Crooks, these books span generations and genres. Alongside fiction are histories of Black Britain and the Caribbean, explorations of migration and identity, and books examining beauty, art, politics and resistance.
Books about Black British history, migration and identity
Black British history does not begin and end in London. In We Were There , Lanre Bakare travels beyond the capital to uncover the Black communities that helped shape modern Britain during the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. From Bradford and Birmingham to Liverpool, Cardiff and Edinburgh, Bakare explores a period of political turmoil and racism alongside extraordinary cultural creativity, community and resistance.
To understand modern Britain, Imaobong Umoren argues, we also need to understand its centuries-long relationship with the Caribbean. Beginning with European contact in the region and moving through conquest, racial slavery, capitalism, revolution, migration and the era of neo-colonialism, Empire Without End traces five centuries of interconnected history. Umoren places race alongside class, labour, war, gender, culture and political economy to examine how empire shaped both Britain and the Caribbean – and why its structures and inequalities continue to matter.
What does it actually mean to leave one country and build a life in another? Colin Grant travels across Britain to listen to the people who have done exactly that, from a Sierra Leonean actor in Northampton to an Iranian taxi driver in Shropshire. These oral histories capture the practical realities of arrival alongside more intimate questions of memory, belonging, assimilation, love and loss. Together, they create a portrait of twenty-first-century Britain told through the people who have migrated here.
Who decides what is beautiful? In Decolonising My Body , journalist and author Afua Hirsch turns that question towards her own relationship with her body. Beginning with her decision to get her first tattoo at forty, Hirsch embarks on a year of examining and unlearning ideas about beauty, purity, adornment and ageing shaped by colonialism and patriarchy. Combining personal experience with global research and conversations with experts and practitioners, she explores histories of skin, hair and body modification. The result connects apparently personal beauty choices to much larger questions about ancestry, culture, politics and power.
Sisters Natalie and Naomi Evans, the founders of Everyday Racism, combine personal experience, interviews, research and practical advice in this exploration of mixed-race identity. They consider discrimination and privilege, family relationships, racism within communities and the difficulty of navigating a society that often tries to fit racial identity into simple categories. Alongside their own experiences of growing up as mixed-race women in Britain, they bring in a range of perspectives from people from mixed backgrounds and mixed families. It is both an exploration of identity and a practical starting point for more thoughtful conversations about race and belonging.
Books by and about Black literary classics
Set after the American Civil War, Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows Sethe, who has escaped the plantation where she was enslaved but cannot escape what happened there. Living with her daughter Denver, she is haunted – psychologically and literally – by the child she lost, whose gravestone bears the single word 'Beloved'. Morrison’s novel confronts the violence and enduring trauma of slavery through a story about memory, motherhood, survival and the impossible choices created by oppression. For readers beginning with Morrison, Beloved is one of the defining works of twentieth-century American literature.
Toni Morrison’s only short story begins when Twyla and Roberta meet as children in a girls’ shelter. They become close, drift apart and repeatedly encounter one another as adults – at a diner, a grocery store and eventually on opposing sides of a protest. Morrison never reveals which woman is Black and which is white, forcing readers to confront the assumptions they make about race as the story unfolds. Published here with an introduction by Zadie Smith, Recitatif compresses Morrison’s fascination with race, friendship, memory and social division into a story short enough to read in one sitting and complex enough to revisit repeatedly.
For readers who want to go deeper into Toni Morrison’s writing, Namwali Serpell offers an accessible work of literary criticism devoted to Morrison as an artist. Rather than allowing Morrison’s enormous cultural status to eclipse the intricacy of the novels themselves, Serpell examines her experiments with literary form and the ideas embedded within them. Bringing together the perspectives of an award-winning novelist and a professor of English, On Morrison invites readers to pay closer attention to how Morrison’s fiction works on the page. Read it alongside Beloved , Recitatif or another Morrison novel to enrich a reread – or to begin exploring her work with a new critical framework.
In 1920s Harlem, Irene Redfield unexpectedly encounters Clare Kendry, a childhood friend she has not seen for years. Clare is now passing as white and living within a world Irene has chosen not to enter. When the two women renew their friendship, fascination, jealousy and desire complicate the careful lives they have constructed. A major work of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen’s short novel examines race alongside class, identity and intimacy, asking what can happen when how the world sees you conflicts with who you understand yourself to be.
When young Sugar arrives in the southern town of Bigelow hoping to start again, gossip quickly follows. Her new neighbour Pearl is carrying grief and trauma of her own, and an unexpected friendship develops between the two women. But neither can entirely escape the past. Bernice L. McFadden’s novel explores Black womanhood, friendship, prejudice, judgement and survival in the American South, placing an intimate relationship between two women at the centre of its story. First published in 2000, Sugar is an ideal choice for readers looking to discover a modern Black American classic driven by character, community and the possibility of change.
Contemporary Black fiction
Wyeth is a young Black painter trying to establish himself in New York’s contemporary art scene, working for a gallery and an art restorer while struggling to capture what he wants in his own portraits. Then he meets Keating, a white former priest wrestling with his faith. Set over a hot Manhattan summer, Brandon Taylor’s novel brings art, religion and romance together in a story about two people searching for meaning in different ways.Minor Black Figures offers both a love story and an exploration of what it means to make art – and to be truly seen.
In the fictional animal kingdom of Jidada, a nation living under a brutal ruler is pushed towards revolution. Narrated by a chorus of animals and centred on Destiny, a young goat returning home to witness her country’s upheaval, NoViolet Bulawayo’s Booker Prize-shortlisted novel uses allegory and satire to examine dictatorship, corruption, colonialism, resistance and the struggle for freedom. Inspired by the political history of Zimbabwe while speaking more broadly to the mechanics of authoritarian power, Glory is inventive, furious and often very funny – a political novel for readers who enjoy fiction that experiments boldly with form.
In Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s dystopian America, incarcerated people can compete in deadly, livestreamed gladiatorial matches for the possibility of freedom. Loretta Thurwar and Hamara 'Hurricane Staxxx' Stacker are lovers, teammates and stars of the brutal spectacle, but Thurwar is approaching the matches that could finally release her. Around them, audiences consume their violence as entertainment while protesters challenge the system that profits from it. Chain-Gang All-Stars combines a high-concept story with an examination of incarceration, racism, capitalism and spectatorship, making it a powerful choice for readers who like speculative fiction with an unmistakably political edge.
After fifty years in London, Alice wants to return to Nigeria. Her daughters disagree about what she should do, while the death of their father unsettles old resentments and family secrets. Around them, other relationships are similarly haunted by choices made years before. Diana Evans brings together questions of home, migration, ageing, parenthood and romantic love in a multigenerational novel moving between Britain and Nigeria.
Layla and Andy joke that sharing a surname must mean they are meant to be together. But shortly before their wedding, Layla discovers that the connection between their families could have a much darker history. As she investigates, questions about her mixed-race identity and Britain’s involvement in slavery begin to complicate both her relationship and her understanding of herself. Phoebe McIntosh combines a contemporary love story with an exploration of inherited history, race and identity, showing how the past can surface in the most intimate parts of the present.
A wife, her husband and her best friend Temi form an apparently enviable trio – except that the husband and best friend cannot stand one another. Set over a single day and told from three perspectives, Ore Agbaje-Williams’ novel gradually reveals how differently each character understands their relationships, loyalties and themselves. As drinks are poured and resentments sharpen, compromises and betrayals begin to emerge. Darkly comic and tightly constructed, The Three of Us is less interested in offering easy heroes and villains than in exposing the tensions beneath friendship, marriage, class and culture.
For Yamaye, weekends mean sound-system culture and nights dancing with her friends at The Crypt, an underground club on the outskirts of London. There she meets Moose and falls in love, imagining the possibility of another kind of life. When their relationship is violently cut short, Yamaye’s world changes, sending her on a journey that eventually takes her to Jamaica. Jacqueline Crooks’ Women’s Prize-shortlisted debut moves through love, loss, music, migration and resistance while bringing a rarely fictionalised culture and era onto the page.
Poetry and memoir by Black writers
Somali British poet Warsan Shire’s first full-length collection moves through migration, womanhood, trauma and resilience. Drawing on her own experiences, those of people close to her, pop culture and news stories, Shire writes about refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls. At the collection’s centre is a girl finding her own route towards adulthood without the nurturing guidance she needs. Intimate experiences sit alongside displacement and inherited histories, making this a collection for readers looking for contemporary poetry about diaspora, family, identity and survival.
Neneh Cherry’s memoir begins with a career-defining image: her 1988 Top of the Pops debut, seven months pregnant and refusing to fit the mould expected of a female pop star. From there, she looks back at the people and experiences that shaped her life – collaborators and friendships, love and family, creative highs, addiction and trauma. Music runs throughout, but A Thousand Threads is equally interested in the three generations of artists and musicians that make up Cherry’s family inheritance
Books about Black resistance, racism and social change
Beginning amid the protests of 2020, cartoonist Ben Passmore turns to more than a century of Black militant history in this work of graphic non-fiction. Moving from Robert Charles at the beginning of the twentieth century through the Black Power movement and later uprisings, Passmore combines historical research with personal reflection, humour and an examination of generational responsibility. The graphic format makes a complex history immediate without simplifying the political questions at its centre.
How should adults talk to children about racism – and at what age should those conversations begin? Ibram X. Kendi approaches these questions through research, his experiences as a father and reflections on his own childhood and education. Rather than treating children as unaware of race, How To Raise an Antiracist considers how young people experience racial ideas and structures at different stages of their lives, and what parents, carers and educators can do in response. It is designed for readers looking for practical frameworks for talking about racism with children while examining the beliefs adults may need to question themselves.
In this political memoir, Kamala Harris traces the experiences and ideas that shaped her path into American public life. Raised in California by the daughter of immigrants and civil rights activists, Harris connects her personal history to her career in law and politics and to wider questions of justice and social change. Alongside autobiography, The Truths We Hold sets out the values and experiences that informed her approach to public service. It is a useful choice for readers interested in Black political history in the United States and the personal story behind one of the most prominent political figures of her generation.
