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  • Topic Guide
  • Staff-Created List

An Anti-Racist Fiction Reading List

The books highlighted in this topic guide confront slavery, Jim Crow segregation, racial bias in the workplace, wrongful conviction and imprisonment, police brutality, and anger felt by people living under racist oppression.

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17 items

  • Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped…
    Book, 2018Chapel Hill, North Carolina : Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2018. — FIC JON
  • "It's 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She's brilliant, but she's also a young black woman working in an old boys' club. Her career has stalled out, she's overlooked for every high-profile…
    Book, 2019New York : Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, [2019] — FICTION WILKINSON Lauren
  • "In this singular collection, John Edgar Wideman, the acclaimed author of Writing to Save a Life, blends the personal, historical, and political to invent complex, charged stories about love, death, struggle, and what we owe each other. With…
    Book, 2018New York, NY : Scribner, 2018. — FIC WIDEMAN
  • 1968: Life for Easy Rawlins is surprisingly... easy. He's living off the proceeds of his last case, trying to keep out of trouble. Of course it's not going to last. Because Easy's old friend Mouse knocks on his door. Mouse is one of the deadliest…
    Large Print, 2016Thorndike, Maine : Center Point Large Print, 2016. — LP FIC MOS ER14
  • A servant and former slave is accused of murdering her employer and his wife in this historical thriller that moves from a Jamaican sugar plantation to the fetid streets of Georgian London.
    Book, 2019Toronto, Ontario : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2019] — FICTION COLLINS Sara
  • "Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears…
    Book, 2015New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2015. — FICTION HANNAHAM
  • 1960s Florida. Kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood Curtis is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South, one mistake is enough to destroy the future. He is sentenced to a juvenile…
    Book, 2019New York : Doubleday, [2019] — FICTION WHITEHEAD Colson
  • "Raised in the "agrarian ghetto" of Dickens--improbably smack in the middle of downtown L.A.--the narrator of The Sellout resigned himself to the fate of all other middle-class Californians: "to die in the same bedroom you'd grown up in, looking up…
    Book, 2015New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. — FIC BEA
  • "Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person -- no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her…
    Book, 1998New York : Perennial Classics, 1998. — FIC HUR
  • "Jojo and his toddler sister, Kayla, live with their grandparents, Mam and Pop, and the occasional presence of their drug-addicted mother, Leonie, on a farm on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Leonie is simultaneously tormented and comforted by…
    Book, 2017New York : Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2017. — FICTION Ward, Jesmyn
  • "Rooted in foundational loss and the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is both a global dystopian narrative and an intimate family story with quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience. Ella and Kev…
    Book, 2020New York : Tom Doherty Associates, 2020. — FICTION ONYEBUCHI Tochi
  • Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living, with her confidence-driven brand, showing other women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains'…
    Book, 2019New York : G.P. Putnam's Sons, [2019] — F REI
  • "The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their…
    Book, 2020New York : Riverhead Books, 2020. — FIC BEN
  • "Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage--and lost his mother and all memory of her when he was a child--but he is also gifted with a mysterious power. Hiram almost drowns when he crashes a carriage into a river, but is saved from the depths by a…
    Book, 2019New York : One World, an imprint of Random House, [2019] — FIC COA
  • "Cross River, Maryland: Established by the leaders of America's only successful slave revolt, the town still evokes the fierce rhythms of its founding. Among its residents are David Sherman, a struggling musician who just happens to be God's last…
    Book, 2019New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, [2019] — FIC SCOTT
  • "A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected"-- Provided by publisher.
    Book, 2013New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. — F Adi
  • Two families from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. Moving forward and backward in time... [this] new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the…
    Book, 2019New York : Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2019. — F Woo