Reading List: 2020’s Most Critically Acclaimed Books
View a more detailed description of the 2020 list.
View a list of all the critically acclaimed titles on our list from 1940 to 2021.
Fiction
- What A Woman’s Gotta Do by Evelyn Coleman
- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw
- The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
- Deacon King Kong by James McBride
- It’s Not All Downhill from Here by Terry McMillan
- B-More Careful by Shannon Holmes
- Bourbon Street by Leonce Gaiter
- American Spy: A Novel by Lauren Wilkinson
- Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick by Zora Neale Hurston
- The Girl with the Louding Voice by Abi Daré
- Black Sunday by Tola Rotimi Abraham
- On the Corner of Hope and Main: A Blessings Novel by Beverly Jenkins
- The Awkward Black Man by Walter Mosley
- Blacktop Wasteland (autographed) by S. A. Cosby
- His Only Wife by Peace Adzo Medie
- Luster by Raven Leilani
- Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature by Kevin Powell
- The Stolen Daughter by ReShonda Tate Billingsley
- Here and Now by Kimberla Lawson Roby
- Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
- Romance in Marseille by Claude McKay
- When No One Is Watching: A Thriller by Alyssa Cole
Nonfiction
- The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
- Black Boy by Richard Wright
- The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations by Toni Morrison
- Stakes Is High: Life After the American Dream by Mychal Denzel Smith
- Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall
- A Promised Land by Barack Obama
- My Vanishing Country by Bakari Sellers
- Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Children’s
- A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
- I Love My Haircut! by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley
- I Am Every Good Thing by Derrick Barnes
- Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi
- Class Act by Jerry Craft
- King and the Dragonflies by Kacen Callender
- Follow Your Dreams, Little One by Vashti Harrison
- Black Brother, Black Brother by Jewell Parker Rhodes
- Geese Are Never Swans by Eva Clark and Created by Kobe Bryant
- Different and the Same by Adijah & Atiya Brabham
- African by Peter Tosh
- A Black Woman Did That by Malaika Adero
- Grown by Tiffany D. Jackson
- Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
Poetry
- Pale Colors in a Tall Field: Poems by Carl Phillips