Favorite Reads

The School for Good Mothers

A Novel

By: Jessamine Chan
Narrated by: Catherine Ho
Length: 11 hours 56 minutes

“This book was absolutely wild. Chan really makes you examine motherhood and how subjective it can be. With her fictional school and its excessive tactics, you wonder how you can judge mothers - is it possible to learn how to be a 'good' mother and what does 'good' even mean. Every moment of this book will stress you out a little (in a good way)... Read more

Heads of the Colored People

Stories

By: Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
Length: 6 hours 13 minutes

A stunning new talent in literary fiction, Nafissa Thompson-Spires grapples with black identity and the contemporary middle class in these compelling, boundary-pushing vignettes.

Each captivating story plunges headfirst into the lives of new, utterly original characters. Some are darkly humorous—from two mothers exchanging snide remarks through... Read more

The Nickel Boys (Winner 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)

A Novel

By: Colson Whitehead
Narrated by: JD Jackson & Colson Whitehead
Length: 6 hours 45 minutes

“A brilliant black boy, in the wrong car, meets the wrong cop. A for-profit penal system puts him in a reform school run by abusers, with a suspicious graveyard out back. What happens next is... a powerful arc bending toward justice? Colson Whitehead delivers a book about suffering that does not revel in suffering, a book about keeping soul in a... Read more

Black Leopard, Red Wolf

The Dark Star Trilogy: Book #1

By: Marlon James
Narrated by: Dion Graham
Length: 23 hours 59 minutes

“An ambitious read of epic proportions! African mythology, history and James' phenomenal imagination come together to make an adventure tale like no other. Engrossing! Daring! Beautifully strange! Read more

We Have Always Been Here

A Queer Muslim Memoir

By: Samra Habib
Narrated by: Parmida Vand
Length: 5 hours 14 minutes

CANADA READS 2020 WINNER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 EDNA STAEBLER AWARD FOR CREATIVE NON-FICTION
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
2020 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD WINNER
ONE OF BOOK RIOT'S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL QUEER BOOKS OF ALL TIME

How do you find yourself when the world tells you that you don't exist?

Samra Habib has spent most of their life searching for the safety to... Read more

If They Come in the Morning...

Voices of Resistance

By: Angela Davis
Narrated by: Janina Edwards & David Sadzin
Length: 10 hours 13 minutes

With race and the police once more burning issues, this classic work from one of America's giants of black radicalism has lost none of its prescience or power.

One of America's most historic political trials is undoubtedly that of Angela Davis. Opening with a letter from James Baldwin to Davis, and including contributions from numerous radicals... Read more

Freedom is a Constant Struggle

Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement

By: Angela Y. Davis
Narrated by: Angela Y. Davis & Coleen Marlo
Length: 5 hours 47 minutes

In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world.

Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's... Read more

Ain't I a Woman

Black Women and Feminism 2nd Edition

By: Bell Hooks
Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
Length: 8 hours 55 minutes

A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain't I a Woman has become a must–read for all those interested in the nature of black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman's involvement with feminism, Hooks attempts to... Read more

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

By: Saidiya Hartman
Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday... Read more

Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?

And Other Conversations About Race

By: Beverly Daniel Tatum
Narrated by: Beverly Daniel Tatum
Length: 13 hours 27 minutes

The classic, New York Times-bestselling book on the psychology of racism that shows us how to talk about race in America.

Walk into any racially mixed high school and you will see Black, White, and Latino youth clustered in their own groups. Is this self-segregation a problem to address or a coping strategy? How can we get past our reluctance to... Read more

Belly of the Beast

The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness

By: Da'Shaun L. Harrison
Narrated by: Da'Shaun L. Harrison
Length: 3 hours 29 minutes

**The 2022 Lammy Award Winner in Transgender Nonfiction**
Exploring the intersections of Blackness, gender, fatness, health, and the violence of policing.

To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for... Read more

An Unkindness of Ghosts

By: Rivers Solomon
Narrated by: Cherise Boothe
Length: 11 hours 53 minutes

“Aster is a misfit. A monster. And a frequent target for humiliation and punishment by the guards stationed on Matilda. Rivers Soloman’s debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts, is a fantastic allegorical analysis of the antebellum south via life aboard a spaceship, searching for a new place to live after Earth became uninhabitable. The narrator did... Read more

Sorrowland

A Novel

By: Rivers Solomon
Narrated by: Karen Chilton
Length: 12 hours 1 minute

“Vern is fleeing an abusive cult that targets Black people. As their body mutates into something entirely new, Vern must face the past before they can move towards their future. This book is many things: an adult fairytale, a Southern gothic horror, a thriller that twists and turns. A testament to forging pain into strength, this book is unlike... Read more

Seven Days in June

By: Tia Williams
Narrated by: Mela Lee
Length: 10 hours 32 minutes

“Fans of second chances and epic teenage love will fall hard for this book. There is just so much feeling and feelings. Chemistry just crackles off the page. Read more

Conjure Women

A Novel

By: Afia Atakora
Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
Length: 13 hours 58 minutes

A mother and daughter with a shared talent for healing—and for the conjuring of curses—are at the heart of this dazzling first novel
 
WINNER OF THE SOCIETY OF AMERICAN HISTORIANS PRIZE • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • NPR • Parade • Book Riot • PopMatters

“Lush, irresistible . . . It took me into the hearts of... Read more

If Beale Street Could Talk

A Novel

By: James Baldwin
Narrated by: Bahni Turpin
Length: 7 hours 7 minutes

From one of the most important writers of the twentieth century comes a stunning love story about a young Black woman whose life is torn apart when her lover is wrongly accused of a crime—"a moving, painful story, so vividly human and so obviously based on reality that it strikes us as timeless” (The New York Times Book Review)."One of the best... Read more

The Fire Next Time

By: James Baldwin
Narrated by: Jesse Martin
Length: 2 hours 25 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The book that galvanized the nation, gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement in the 1960s—and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. - “The finest essay I’ve ever read.” —Ta-Nehisi CoatesAt once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the... Read more

Looking for Lorraine

The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry

By: Imani Perry
Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
Length: 8 hours 26 minutes

Winner of the 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction

Winner of the Shilts-Grahn Triangle Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

Winner of the 2019 Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award

A New York Times Notable Book of 2018

A revealing portrait of one of the most gifted and charismatic, yet... Read more

Kindred

By: Octavia E. Butler
Narrated by: Kim Staunton
Length: 10 hours 54 minutes

The first science fiction written by a Black woman, Kindred has become a cornerstone of Black American literature. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity. Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably... Read more

My Soul to Keep

African Immortals: Book #1

By: Tananarive Due
Narrated by: Peter Francis James
Length: 18 hours 17 minutes

From the award-winning master of horror and Afrofuturism Tananarive Due comes a modern-classic of dark introspection. When Jessica marries David, he is everything she wants in a family man: brilliant, attentive, ever youthful. Yet she still feels something about him is just out of reach. Soon, as people close to Jessica begin to meet violent,... Read more