This quarter is shaping up to be an exciting time for new books by acclaimed black authors. From Nobel Prize winners to rising stars, there’s a diverse array of voices and perspectives to dive into.
Whether you’re in the mood for thought-provoking contemporary fiction, gripping dystopian tales, or thrilling crime narratives, this lineup has something special in store. In the list below are must read titles that are sure to grip, captivate and entertain you.
Title: Three Leaves, Three Roots: Poems on the Haiti-Congo Story
Author: Danielle Legros Georges
Publication Date: January 2025
Between 1960 and 1975, thousands of Haitian professionals emigrated to Congo, a fellow Black francophone nation that emerged under the revolutionary new leadership of Patrice Lumumba. Three Leaves, Three Roots is a collection of Legros Georges’s creative reconstructions of the Haiti Congo experience. She interweaves her verses with excerpts from primary sources such as the interviews she conducted with the Congo émigrés and letters written by people both famous and obscure, including Lumumba, Fidel Castro, and members of Legros Georges’s family.
The result is a richly layered portrayal of an era of decolonization and rebuilding, a time that sparked with both promise and vulnerability for the Pan Africanist and Black Power movements. This collection is an important work of Haitian American poetry and of Black history: it reminds us, artfully, that movements of solidarity among people of colour have always existed and always will exist.
Order your copy here.
Title: Death of the Author
Author: Nnedi Okorafor
Publication date: February 2025
Life has thrown Zelu some curveballs over the years, but when she’s suddenly dropped from her university job and her latest novel is rejected, all in the middle of her sister’s wedding, her life is upended. Disabled, unemployed and from a nosy, high-achieving, judgmental family, she’s not sure what comes next.
In her hotel room that night, she takes the risk that will define her life – she decides to write a book VERY unlike her others. A science fiction drama about androids and AI after the extinction of humanity. And everything changes. What follows is a tale of love and loss, fame and infamy, of extraordinary events in one world, and another. And as Zelu’s life evolves, the lines between fiction and reality begin to blur. You can get your copy here.
Title: Salutation Road
Author: Salma Ibrahim
Publication date: February 2025
Twenty-three-year-old Sirad Ali is a woman adrift. Abandoned by her father in childhood, doing her best to support her mother and younger brother in their small flat in South London, she can’t help but wonder if this is the life she really wants.
One morning, Sirad boards her bus to work and finds herself transported to an alternate timeline in present-day Mogadishu. Over the course of a single day, under the sweltering East African sun, Sirad must contend with a lost reality. There she encounters an almost unrecognizable version of her family and comes face to face with her double, Ubah – the woman she could have been, had her parents never fled to London during the Somali Civil War. Back home in Greenwich, Sirad must go on with life, consumed by all she now knows. But then Ubah mysteriously appears in London, and Sirad begins to understand that nothing will ever be the same again .
Get your copy here.
Title: Madame Sosostris and The Festival for the Brokenhearted
Author: Ben Okri
Publication Date: March 2025
Viv, who’s in the House of Lords, had the idea for the festival on the twentieth anniversary of the day her first husband left her. Six months later, crowds descend on the grounds of a dreamlike chateau in the South of France, avidly awaiting the experience of a lifetime, Viv’s inaugural Festival for the Broken-Hearted.
Everyone is in fancy dress. No one knows who anyone is. They wander the beautiful woods with just one night to change everything. And to crown it all, a very special guest is expected: world-renowned clairvoyant and fortune-teller Madame Sosostris, known as the wisest woman in Europe, and not seen since the pages of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. She will attend for one night only.
But will she actually appear at all, or will Viv’s carefully orchestrated festival fall to pieces? Will Viv and her husband make it through the night? Will anyone else? Part vision, part mystery, this story of a midsummer night’s madness is also an homage to Eliot’s famous poem, in Ben Okri’s inimitable style, as alive with echoes and reverberations as the enchanted forest itself. Think Ingmar Bergman meets William Shakespeare, with a dash of Mozart.
Pre order your copy here.
Title: Dreamcount
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Publication Date: March 2025
In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s highly anticipated novel, Dream Count, she follows the lives of four women: Chiamaka, Zikora, Omelogor, and Kadiatou.
Chiamaka, a Nigerian travel writer based in America, is alone during the pandemic. Having no current romantic partner, she finds herself constantly remembering the past with her past lovers, struggling to come to terms with her choices and her regrets. On the other hand, Zikora, her best friend, is recently heartbroken, having suffered a betrayal from her lover. Where before she was a confident, successful lawyer with the Midas touch, she now has to turn to the person she thought she least needed to survive.
Omelogor is Chiamaka’s cousin, a ‘financial powerhouse’ in Nigeria, bold and outspoken. But she begins to wonder if she really knows herself as much as she thought she did. Finally, Kadiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America. But when things get too hard, everything she has worked hard to achieve seems likely to go down the drain. In this book, Adichie explores profound questions about the nature of love, happiness, honesty, and self-knowledge with ‘emotional urgency and poignant, unflinching observations on the human heart. Get a copy here.
Title: Dream Hotel
Author: Laila Lalami
Publication date: March 2025
Imagine a world where the government could see your dreams. That’s exactly what Moroccan-American Laila Lalami does in her upcoming novel, The Dream Hotel, set in a near future.
Sara is returning home from a conference abroad when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside at the airport and inform her that she will commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, their algorithm has determined that she presents an imminent risk to the person she loves most, and must now be transferred to a retention centre for twenty-one days to lower her ‘risk score’.
But when Sara arrives at Madison to be observed alongside other dangerous dreamers, it soon becomes clear that getting home to her family is going to cost more than just three weeks of good behaviour. And as every minor misdemeanour, every slight deviation from the rules, adds time to her stay, she begins to wonder if there might be more here than first meets the eye. Then, one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and setting off a chain of events that lead Sara on a collision course with the companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
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Title: Theft
Author: Abdulrazak Gurnah
Publication Date: March 2025
It is the 1990s. Growing up in Zanzibar, three very different young people Karim, Fauzia and Badar are coming of age, and dreaming of great possibilities in their young nation. But for Badar, an uneducated servant boy who has never known his parents, it seems as if all doors are closed.
Brought into a lowly position in a great house in Dar es Salaam, Badar finds the first true home of his life – and the friendship of Karim, the young man of the house. Even when a shattering false accusation sees Badar sent away, Karim and Fauzia refuse to turn away from their friend. But as the three of them take their first steps in love, infatuation, work and parenthood, their bond is tested – and Karim is tempted into a betrayal that will change all of their lives forever.
Pre order your copy here
Title: Universality
Author: Natasha Brown
Publication Date: March 2025
On a Yorkshire farm, a man is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar . A plucky young journalist sets out to uncover the truth surrounding the attack, connecting the dots between an amoral banker landlord, an iconoclastic columnist, and a radical anarchist movement. She solves the mystery, but her viral long read exposé raises more questions than it answers.
Universality is a twisty, slippery descent into the rhetoric of truth and power. Through a voyeuristic lens, it focuses on words: what we say, how we say it, and what we really mean. The follow-up novel to Natasha Brown’s Assembly is a compellingly nasty celebration of the spectacular force of language. It dares you to look away.
Preorder yours here
As you make your way through this selection, I hope you will be transported, challenged, and inspired. So what are you waiting for? Grab a cosy spot and get reading and enjoy the journey.