It’s a fact that a high percentage of the best books that have come out in this century have been written by Black women authors. (Truth be told, there are so many excellent works that this list could simply centered on the best contemporary authors and still be accurate.) Nevertheless, Black women’s stories deserve to be heard, and when the stories are this compelling, this engaging, and this beautifully written, they’re impossible to ignore. If you’re searching for your next listen, consider a title written by one of these remarkably talented Black women authors. Their books might easily become your new favorites.
Brit Bennett
Brit Bennett was raised in Southern California, earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan, and is currently living in Los Angeles. She first gained attention with her 2014 essay, I Don’t Know What to Do With Good White People,
which was published on Jezebel. In 2016, her debut novel The Mothers received critical acclaim, and she was selected for the prestigious National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 prize.
Bennett’s second novel The Vanishing Half was released in 2020 and immediately shot to the top of the New York Times best seller list. It has since been compared to the works of the great Toni Morrison and hailed as a best book of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, People, and Time magazine. This listen follows the intertwined stories of light-skinned twin sisters, Desiree and Stella Vignes. , Raised in Mallard, Louisiana, they part ways as young adults in the early 1950s and go on to live very different lives. Desiree escapes an abusive marriage and returns to Mallard with her dark-skinned daughter; Stella marries her white boss and raises her blue-eyed daughter in the suburbs, where she passes as white. Their decisions have a ripple effect that go on to impact their daughter’s lives as well.
Yaa Gyasi
Yaa Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana, and raised in Huntsville, Alabama. Her first writing success was as a child when she received a certificate of achievement signed by LeVar Burton after submitting the first story she ever wrote to the Reading Rainbow Young Writers and Illustrators Contest. That and reading Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as a teenager are what inspired her to become a writer. She earned a BA in English from Stanford University and an MFA in creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Few 2020 audiobooks are as gut-wrenching as Yaa Gyasi’s Transcendent Kingdom, a novel that examines the difficulties of grief, loss, addiction, depression, family, and much more. Protagonist Gifty is a PhD candidate in neuroscience, specifically studying depression and addiction. Her brother Nana died of a heroin overdose, and her mother is suicidal and won't get out of bed. With all the suffering Gifty sees around her, she's determined to find the scientific reason behind it. This audiobook is read by Golden Voice lifetime achievement award-winning narrator Bahni Turpin.
Tayari Jones
Tayari Jones was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. She grew up during the time of the Atlanta Child Murders, and two of her classmates at Oglethorpe Elementary—Yusuf Bell and Terry Pue—were victims. Being so close to racially-charged violence at such a young age would have a lasting influence on Jones and her writing, serving as the inspiration for her first novel Leaving Atlanta. Jones’s work often focuses on family life and the Black experience in the Southern United States.
Tayari Jones’s An American Marriage was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, and it won the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Celestial and Roy are newlyweds with their whole lives ahead of them when Roy is arrested and sentenced to 12 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. After five years, Roy’s sentence is overturned, but in many ways, the damage is already done. Jones followed up the success of American Marriage with an audio-exclusive short story, Half Light, the compelling tale of two sisters read by Hall of Famer Bahni Turpin that was named Audible’s Best Short Listen of 2020.
Jesmyn Ward
Jesmyn Ward was born in Berkley, California, and she now lives in New Orleans, where she is an associate professor of English at Tulane University. Her first novel Where the Line Bleeds was published in 2008. It became an ESSENCE Book Club pick and received a Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) Honor Award in 2009. Ward is the first woman to ever receive two National Book Awards, one in 2011 for Salvage the Bones and one in 2017 for Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Ward’s most recent novel Sing, Unburied, Sing is a portrait of a mixed-race American family and their struggles. Jojo is 13, mixed-race, and struggling to figure out what it means to be a man as he’s being raised by his Black mother’s family. His mother Leonie wants to be a better mother, but she struggles with addiction and visions of her dead brother. Meanwhile, Jojo’s white father has just been released from prison, and so Leonie decides to take her children and drive north to the state penitentiary to pick up the family’s patriarch. The audiobook is narrated by Kelvin Harrison, Rutina Wesley, and Chris Chalk.
Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay is an American essayist, short story writer, novelist, editor, and social commentator. She has received multiple Lambda Literary Awards. In 2016, Roxane Gay made history as one of the first women, alongside poet Yona Harvey, to be hired as a lead writer at Marvel. Gay cowrote Black Panther: World of Wakanda, which was praised for its representation of LGBTQIA+ and women characters. In June 2020, Queerty named Roxane Gay one of the 50 heroes who represent the pioneering spirit of the first prides across the country.
Gay is a hero and icon for so many people, and her books are just one of the many ways in which the author contributes to the community.
In her memoir Hunger, Gay shares the difficult and heartbreaking story of her experience with sexual assault, and the body dysmorphia and eating disorder issues she experienced in response to that trauma. Gay narrates this memoir with honesty and power, as only the author herself could.
Angie Thomas
Angie Thomas is one of the most important voices in contemporary young adult literature. Born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, where she still lives today, Thomas is probably best known for her debut novel The Hate U Give. Recently adapted into a film starring Amandla Stenberg, The Hate U Give was a New York Times best seller, won multiple awards, and received praise for how it deals with the issue of police brutality and its effects on the Black community. In her much-anticipated and recently released follow-up, Concrete Rose, Thomas revisits Garden Heights 17 years before the events of The Hate U Give.
On the Come Up is Angie Thomas’s second novel, and it has all the heart and bite of her celebrated debut. 16-year-old Bri has a dream: she wants to be one of the greatest rappers of all time. But to start, she’ll have to win her first battle. Bri pours all of her anger and frustration with the world into her first song, but when her words go viral, it’s for all the wrong reasons. The Hate U Give’s narrator, Hall of Famer Bahni Turpin, narrates this audiobook as well. Angie Thomas discussed why she was so happy to have Bahni Turpin back at the mic, saying that the narrator really brought it and she gave her style and soul and heart to it. I’m so thankful for it.
N. K. Jemisin
If she’s not already, N. K. Jemisin should be your go-to author for compelling science fiction and fantasy novels. Jemisin lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her novels have been nominated for multiple awards, including the Hugo, the Nebula, the Tiptree, and the Crawford, just to name a few. Her Broken Earth trilogy is adored by listeners and critics alike, and that series made history as the first trilogy to win the Hugo for every single book, three years in a row. Most recently, Jemisin won the Hugo Award in 2020 for Best Novelette for Emergency Skin.
Jemisin’s novel The City We Became marks the beginning of a new series that follows the story of five New Yorkers who must come together to defend their city. In this world, every city has a soul, and New York has six of them, one representing each borough. The audiobook is narrated by Hall of Fame narrator Robin Miles, whose reading receives nothing but the highest praise from Audible listeners.
Tananarive Due
Tananarive Due is the horror writer you need to listen to, if you haven’t started already. Not only is Due a prolific writer, she’s also well-known for being a film historian with a particular interest in Black horror. Due’s work has been nominated for multiple Bram Stoker Awards, and she received the NAACP Image Award for her novel In the Night of the Heat.
If you’re looking for a good introduction to Tananarive Due’s work, try a standalone novel before diving into her series. The Good House is an excellent haunted house story with depth, drama, and heart. After a devastating event destroys her life as she knew it, Angela Toussant returns to her family home to find out what happened there. What she uncovers is a family curse that goes back generations. Like Jemisin’s The City We Became, this book is also expertly narrated by Robin Miles.
Alyssa Cole
Alyssa Cole is a New York Times and USA Today best selling author of romance novels—contemporary, historical and science fiction. No matter the genre, Cole’s works often incorporate themes of political activism. Cole’s historical romance novel An Extraordinary Union was named the American Library Association’s RUSA Best Romance for 2018, while her contemporary romance A Princess in Theory was listed as one of the New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2018. Last year, her fun, quirky rom-com Audible Original The A.I. Who Loved Me debuted, much to the delight of her fans.
Most recently, Cole delved into the thriller genre with her novel When No One Is Watching. Sydney Green was born and raised in Brooklyn, but lately she’s noticing that her neighborhood seems to be changing around her. Desperately trying to hang onto her community’s history, Sydney begins to look into the neighborhood’s past, with the help of her neighbor Theo. But as the two look deeper into the past, they begin to understand that not everything is as it seems. And the neighbors they thought were moving out into the suburbs might actually be disappearing.
Samantha Irby
If you like your memoirs candid and laugh-out-loud hilarious, we guarantee you’ll love Samantha Irby. Irby began her writing career with the blog bitches gotta eat,
where she discussed topics ranging from her struggles with Crohn's disease to thoughts on sex and intimacy. It’s that very degree of unabashed honesty and edgy sense of humor that made Irby a favorite of comedy and essay enthusiasts everywhere. Her first book, Meaty was praised for being as smart as it is raunchy and visceral, and her later collections follow suit.
In her latest gem, Wow, No Thank You., Irby again wields her incomparable sense of wit and humor to address life at 40, looking back on the decades gone and ruminating on what’s to come. This listen delves into what it’s like to come to fame and begin taking executive meetings in Los Angeles all the while being, as Irby describes herself, “a cheese-fry eating, slightly damp Midwest person.” The best part? This audiobook is narrated by Irby herself, who sticks the landing with her signature droll delivery and exquisite sense of comedic timing.
