The Best 22 Books of the 21st Century by Black Writers

The Known World

By: Edward P. Jones
Narrated by: Kevin R. Free
Length: 14 hours 17 minutes

In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia. Making certain he never circumvents the law, Townsend runs his... Read more

All Aunt Hagar's Children

Stories

By: Edward P. Jones
Narrated by: Peter Francis James
Length: 15 hours

In fourteen sublime stories, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever.Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the... Read more

Between the World and Me

By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
Length: 3 hours 35 minutes

“In this short and powerful book, Coates writes to his 15-year old son about his experience of being a black man in America. Cannot recommend enough! Read more

White Teeth

A Novel

By: Zadie Smith
Narrated by: Lenny Henry, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Ray Panthaki, Sagar Arya & Zadie Smith
Length: 18 hours 41 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Updated for the 25th Anniversary with a new introduction by the author • The blockbuster debut novel from “a preternaturally gifted” writer (The New York Times) and author of On Beauty and Swing Time—set against London's racial and cultural tapestry, reveling in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with... Read more

A Mercy

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 6 hours 25 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In “one of Morrison’s most haunting works” (The New York Times), the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the story of a mother and a daughter—a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that... Read more

On Beauty

By: Zadie Smith
Narrated by: Peter Francis James
Length: 18 hours 48 minutes

“"All is fair in love and...academia." On Beauty is an unflinching, harsh, full-bodied approach to family, politics, and academia. In this novel, a microcosm of opinionated, muddled, chaotic people unravels; their high-and-mighty ideals are called into question. Smith's novel is a challenging read; while scrutinizing the Belseys and the Kipps,... Read more

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

By: Isabel Wilkerson
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 22 hours 40 minutes

“I'm sorry I hadn't gotten to this sooner. Wilkerson pulls together so much of what I already knew about the US but not necessarily why... a great audiobook, too. Read more

The New Jim Crow

Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition

By: Michelle Alexander
Narrated by: Karen Chilton
Length: 16 hours 56 minutes

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been
adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of
the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the
winner of... Read more

The Fifth Season

The Broken Earth: Book #1

By: N. K. Jemisin
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 15 hours 27 minutes

“Maybe one of the best science fiction/fantasy novels I've ever read! No wonder the entire trilogy won three consecutive Hugo Awards. I loved: the masterfully crafted nonlinear storytelling that kept me guessing til the very end, the unparalleled world building, the strong characterization, the high stakes action/adventure, the diversity of... Read more

Citizen

An American Lyric

By: Claudia Rankine
Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
Length: 1 hour 37 minutes

Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the... Read more

Sing, Unburied, Sing

A Novel

By: Jesmyn Ward
Narrated by: Kelvin Harrison, Jr., Chris Chalk & Rutina Wesley
Length: 8 hours 22 minutes

“Sing, Unburied, Sing is a dark and gorgeous song of love and heartbreak, haunting and tragic and disorienting in its timelessness. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill anchors Ward's tale to Mississippi today, which is almost indistinguishable from its notorious yesterday, a present and past (ironically) made more alive in the novel by ghosts and... Read more

Heavy

An American Memoir

By: Kiese Laymon
Narrated by: Kiese Laymon
Length: 6 hours 17 minutes

“"I wanted to write a lie," Kiese Laymon says in the opening pages of his brutal, beautiful memoir, Heavy. The book is written in the second person, addressed to his mother, with whom Laymon shares a turbulent, intimate relationship. She feeds his mind with books, but critiques the way Laymon feeds his body as he struggles with his weight. She is... Read more

A Brief History of Seven Killings

By: Marlon James
Narrated by: Ryan Anderson, Dwight Bacquie, Cherise Boothe, Robertson Dean, Johnathan McClain & Robert Younis
Length: 25 hours 59 minutes

On December 3, 1976, just before the Jamaican general election and two days before Bob Marley was to play the Smile Jamaica Concert, gunmen stormed his house, machine guns blazing. The attack nearly killed the Reggae superstar, his wife, and his manager, and injured several others. Marley would go on to perform at the free concert on December 5,... Read more

Salvage the Bones

A Novel

By: Jesmyn Ward
Narrated by: January LaVoy
Length: 9 hours 22 minutes

Bloomsbury presents Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, read by January LaVoy.

Winner of the National Book Award
A New York Times Best Book of the 21st Century
An Atlantic Great American Novel of the Last 100 Years

"A taut, wily novel, smartly plotted and voluptuously written . . . Jesmyn Ward makes beautiful music, plays deftly with her reader’s... Read more

Men We Reaped

A Memoir

By: Jesmyn Ward
Narrated by: January LaVoy
Length: 7 hours 19 minutes

Bloomsbury presents Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward, read by January LaVoy.

Named a Best Book of the Century by The New York Times Book Review and New York Magazine

The two-time National Book Award winner and author of Salvage the Bones and Let Us Descend, contends with the deaths of five young men dear to her, and the risk of being a Black man in... Read more

An American Marriage

A Novel

By: Tayari Jones
Narrated by: Sean Crisden & Eisa Davis
Length: 8 hours 59 minutes

“Tayari Jones comes in fierce with An American Marriage. Delving into the lives of the newly married Roy and Celestial, this is a novel that pulls no punches from beginning to end. I won't ruin the surprise, but they're hit with a harrowing event that will define not only their relationship, but each of their lives, forever. Writing with an... Read more

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

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

“This intense, experimental history weaves together biography, archival record, photographs, and a kind of radical act of imagination to tell the stories of Black and queer women in Philadelphia & NYC at the turn of the century - their experiments in love, living, sex, family, gender, autonomy - all while under severe legal, societal, and... Read more

Americanah

By: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Narrated by: Diana Ángel
Length: 19 hours 53 minutes

Una original historia sobre la inmigración en Estados Unidos desde el punto de vista de una estudiante de literatura nigeriana. Americanah ha sido galardonada con el National Book Critics Circle Award 2014 y seleccionada por los ciudadanos de Nueva York como el libro ganador de la campaña «One Book, One New York» 2017. -Edición especial... Read more

Erasure

A Novel

By: Percival Everett
Narrated by: Sean Crisden
Length: 8 hours 16 minutes

“I'd only been meaning to read Erasure for 23 years, but sadly it took the confluence of a Hollywood movie and a new Percival Everett novel for me to finally get around to it. Better late than never, right? Erasure is a masterful satire about the expectations of being Black, of what Black writers are allowed to write about (spoiler alert: being... Read more