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Books › Lists › Best Books About Race in America
Essential fiction and nonfiction about the history and present of race in America — reviewed by BookBrowse’s expert editors.
Literature has always been one of the most powerful tools for understanding race in America — the history, the present, the structures and systems and everyday textures of a country shaped by slavery and its long aftermath. The books on this list span genres: novels that use the past to illuminate the present, memoirs of personal reckoning, nonfiction that documents what law and policy have done to Black Americans, and fiction that captures the specific experience of navigating a white country in a Black body.
These are books that challenge comfortable narratives and complicate easy conclusions. They are also books that are profoundly literary — written with craft and precision, not simply earnestness. BookBrowse’s expert editors have reviewed each of these titles in full, often with extended commentary on context and reception. These are the books that BookBrowse readers return to as a foundation — and the books that every new title in this space is measured against.
by Toni Morrison
Beloved is Morrison's undisputed masterpiece. It elegantly captures her trademark touches: elegant prose, fantastical occurrences, striking characters, and racial tension.
by Colson Whitehead
From prize-winning, bestselling author Colson Whitehead, a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South
by Yaa Gyasi
Winner of the 2016 BookBrowse Debut Author Award
A novel of breathtaking sweep and emotional power that traces three hundred years in Ghana and along the way also becomes a truly great American novel. Extraordinary for its exquisite language, its implacable sorrow, its soaring beauty, and for its monumental portrait of the forces that shape families and nations, Homegoing heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
by Colson Whitehead
In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A bold and personal literary exploration of America's racial history by "the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States" (The New York Observer)
by Bryan Stevenson
Stevenson, a civil rights lawyer, builds the Equal Justice Initiative and fights to exonerate a Black man on death row for a murder he did not commit. His memoir is about the American criminal justice system — and about what legal advocacy looks like when it is driven by moral conviction.
by Angie Thomas
Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter witnesses the police shooting of her unarmed childhood friend Khalil — and then watches as the country decides what Khalil’s death means. Thomas’s YA novel, written in the wake of Black Lives Matter, became the book that a generation of teenagers and adults needed.
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fearless, gripping, at once darkly funny and tender, spanning three continents and numerous lives, Americanah is a richly told story set in today's globalized world.
by Jesmyn Ward
A poor Black family in rural Mississippi prepares for Hurricane Katrina as the narrator’s teenage pregnancy advances. Ward’s Faulknerian novel is about race, poverty, and place — and about the specific way that natural disaster falls hardest on those the country has already decided to leave behind.
by Jesmyn Ward
A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward.
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