African American Historical Fiction

When Lizzie McDuffie, maid to Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, boldly proclaimed herself FDR’s “Secretary-On-Colored-People’s-Affairs,” she became more than just a maid—she became the President’s eyes and ears into the Black community. After joining the White House to work alongside her husband, FDR’s personal valet, Lizzie managed to become completely indispensable to the Roosevelt family. Never shy about pointing out injustices, she advocated for the needs and rights of her fellow African Americans when those in the White House blocked access to the President.

The daughter of a powerful Atlanta dynasty, Ricki Wilde is the opposite of her famous socialite sisters. In her bones, Ricki knows that somewhere, a different, more exciting life awaits her. When she moves into a Harlem brownstone, she leaves behind her family, wealth, and chaotic romantic decisions to realize her dream of opening a flower shop. One evening Ricki encounters a handsome, deeply mysterious stranger who knocks her world off balance in the most unexpected way.

Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."

Bern Hendricks has just received the call of a lifetime. As one of the world’s preeminent experts on the famed twentieth-century composer Frederick Delaney, Bern knows everything there is to know about the man behind the music. When Mallory Roberts, a board member of the distinguished Delaney Foundation and direct descendant of the man himself, asks for Bern’s help authenticating a newly discovered piece, which may be his famous lost opera, RED, he jumps at the chance.

In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all. W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart.

He is a devilish and handsome ex-football player, now a rising sports agent at one of the hottest firms in the country. She is the uncompromising Yancey Harrington Braxton, an up-and-coming Broadway star who oozes charm and bleeds ambition. Both believe that in each other they've finally met their match. A lavish wedding is planned, and the ultimate power couple plans to spend their lives in holy matrimony. But just before the nuptials, fate and a little comeuppance from the past threaten the happy couple's future.

In November 1960, all of America watched as a tiny six-year-old black girl, surrounded by federal marshals, walked through a mob of screaming segregationists and into her school. An icon of the civil rights movement, Ruby Bridges chronicles each dramatic step of this pivotal event in history through her own words.

When Sheriff Mapes is summoned to a sugarcane plantation to find a dead Cajun farmer, he knows who committed the crime. Mapes finds himself powerless, however, when nearly 20 elderly black men confess to the murder. Can justice be served, or will the dead man's brutish father pass judgment his way?

Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him.

Celie has grown up poor in rural Georgia, despised by society and abused by her own family. She strives to protect her sister, Nettie, from a similar fate, and while Nettie escapes to a new life as a missionary in Africa, Celie is left behind without her best friend and confidante, married off to an older suitor, and sentenced to a life alone with a harsh and brutal husband. In an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear, Celie begins writing letters to God. The letters, spanning 20 years, record a journey of self-discovery and empowerment guided by the light of a few strong women.

Josephine "Jojo" Best has it all figured out. Just 17, she's been to college, she has her own hairdressing shop, and nothing will distract her from her goals. That is, until handsome George Brooks begins to pursue her. Then the return of her childhood nemesis complicates her life even further. No girl is immune to Adam Morgan's charm. But when a wound brings him home from the War Between the States, it's a girl he used to call "Pest" who's turning the tables. All grown up, Jojo is being courted by another soldier, and Adam knows it would be foolish to play with her heart.

Her kingdom had been stolen from her… The one thing that she loved most had been denied her… And, as Kassiyon was marched back to Transvovia as penance for the crimes of her lover, the Gilgothian king, she knew she would do anything to return to her people…to return to the only thing that meant everything to her. However, Bakko II had other ideas. He had watched her fight fiercely on the battlefield. And, Bakko was forced to admit that he admired the Gilgothian Hellcat. Only Transvovian female warriors fought as she had! And, there was nothing he wanted more than to have her passion ...

Born into slavery on a Mississippi plantation, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield has been raised in the safety of Philadelphia’s Quaker community by a wealthy adoptive mother. Sheltered and educated, Eliza’s happy childhood always included music lessons to nurture her unique gift: a glorious three octave singing voice that leaves listeners in awe. But on the eve of her twenty-fourth birthday, young Eliza’s world is thrown into a tailspin when her mother dies.

In the segregated South of the mid-1900s, 14-year-old Nell bears witness to a world that embraces the oppression of women. She is fascinated with the prospect of being an independent person - but when she turns 16, she is married off and brought to the city of Boston as a bride. Nell is a shy girl who must quickly learn how to be a wife and mother. She quickly discovers that she must acquire new skills to navigate the unknown territory of the North, as well as her relationship with her husband, Henry, who is controlling and emotionally abusive.

Sage is no longer the street wise girl from the hood struggling to rise above her circumstances. She's made it out and is now living the life she could only dream of when she was growing up in Watts, hustling with her girls, and dating dope boys for a come up. Now, she is the come up. However, Sage will soon learn money can't buy happiness. When She gets bored, and starts looking for excitement, Sage begins to take risks that will compromise everything she's worked hard for; and as with any bad decision, there will be consequences to pay. Babygirl has quickly become a fan favorite for urban...

Two Wisconsin soldiers stationed in Kentucky escort a runaway girl to Ohio's underground railroad while ruthless slave catchers track them. They must cross 100 miles of unknown territory, outrunning their pursuers, and avoiding John Hunt Morgan’s Thunderbolt Raiders to reach Levi Coffin and the Underground Railroad. This emotional story based on true events during the American Civil War is about finding common ground, overcoming ignorance, and fighting the good fight. Soldier Boy explores the relationship between its title character, who is learning to trust again, and Sgt. Jesse Berch, ...

January 1970 finds Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, LA’s premier Black detective, at 50 years of age despite all expectations. He has a loving family, a beautiful home, and a thriving investigation agency. All is right with the world… and then Amethystine Stoller, his own personal Helen of Troy, arrives. Her ex-husband is missing. A simple enough case. But even as Easy takes his first step in the investigation he trips. He falls into the memory of things past. Little things, like loss, love, a world war, and a hunger that has eaten at him since he was a Black boy on his own.

Ady, a curious, sharp-witted girl, and her fierce mother, Sanite, are inseparable. Enslaved to a businessman in the French Quarter of New Orleans, the pair spend their days reminiscing about their family’s rebellious and storied history and dreaming of a loving future. When mother and daughter are separated, Ady is left hopeless and directionless until she stumbles into the Mockingbird Inn and meets Lenore, a free Black woman with whom she becomes fast friends. Lenore invites Ady to join a clandestine society of spies called the Daughters.

Caren Gray manages Belle Vie, a sprawling antebellum plantation that sits between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, where the past and the present coexist uneasily. The estate's owners have turned the place into an eerie tourist attraction, complete with full-dress re-enactments and carefully restored slave quarters. Outside the gates, a corporation with ambitious plans has been busy snapping up land from struggling families who have been growing sugar cane for generations, and now replacing local employees with illegal laborers. Tensions mount when the body of a female migrant worker is found in a shallow grave on the edge of the property.

Dunbar-Ortiz adroitly challenges the founding myth of the United States and shows how policy against the Indigenous peoples was colonialist and designed to seize the territories of the original inhabitants, displacing or eliminating them. And as Dunbar-Ortiz reveals, this policy was praised in popular culture, through writers like James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman, and in the highest offices of government and the military.