New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2016
The New York Times publishes a list of “100 Notable Books” each year (see the complete list for 2017). The fiction, poetry, and nonfiction books are selected annually by the editors of “The New York Times Book Review.” The list represents the most notable books reviewed by the Times during the the prior 12 months. We share the authors of African descent who made the “Notables” list.
9 Noteable Books by Authors of African Descent in 2016
Fiction
Another Brooklyn: A Novel
by Jacqueline Woodson
- Selected for 1 Book Club’s Reading List
- 2017 BCALA Literary Award
- A New York Times Notable Book for 2016
Publication Date: Aug 09, 2016
List Price: $22.99
Format: Hardcover, 192 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780062359988
Imprint: Amistad
Publisher: HarperCollins
Parent Company: News Corp
Read a Description of Another Brooklyn: A Novel
The acclaimed New York Times bestselling and National Book Awardwinning author of Brown Girl Dreaming delivers her first adult novel in twenty years.Running into a long-ago friend sets memory from the 1970s in motion for August, transporting her to a time and a place where friendship was everything—until it wasn’t. For August and her girls, sharing confidences as they ambled through neighborhood streets, Brooklyn was a place where they believed that they were beautiful, talented, brilliant—a part of a future that belonged to them.But beneath the hopeful veneer, there was another Brooklyn, a dangerous place where grown men reached for innocent girls in dark hallways, where ghosts haunted the night, where mothers disappeared. A world where madness was just a sunset away and fathers found hope in religion. Like Louise Meriwether’s Daddy Was a Number Runner and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn heartbreakingly illuminates the formative time when childhood gives way to adulthood—the promise and peril of growing up—and exquisitely renders a powerful, indelible, and fleeting friendship that united four young lives.
Fiction
The Sun Is Also a Star
by Nicola Yoon
Publication Date: Nov 01, 2016
List Price: $18.99
Format: Hardcover, 384 pages
Classification: Fiction
Target Age Group: Young Adult
ISBN13: 9780553496680
Imprint: Delacorte Press
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Read a Description of The Sun Is Also a Star
Natasha: I’m a girl who believes in science and facts. Not fate. Not destiny. Or dreams that will never come true. I’m definitely not the kind of girl who meets a cute boy on a crowded New York City street and falls in love with him. Not when my family is twelve hours away from being deported to Jamaica. Falling in love with him won’t be my story.
Daniel: I’ve always been the good son, the good student, living up to my parents’ high expectations. Never the poet. Or the dreamer. But when I see her, I forget about all that. Something about Natasha makes me think that fate has something much more extraordinary in store—for both of us.
The Universe: Every moment in our lives has brought us to this single moment. A million futures lie before us. Which one will come true?
Fiction
The Underground Railroad: A Novel
by Colson Whitehead
- A Top 10 Book in the “Fiction Books of the 21st Century” Category
- 2 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- Hurston/Wright Honored Book (2017)
- Kirkus Prize Finalist/Winner 2016
- A 2016 Oprah Book Club Selection
- 2017 BCALA Literary Award
- A New York Times Notable Book for 2016
Publication Date: Aug 02, 2016
List Price: $26.95
Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780385542364
Imprint: Doubleday
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Read a Description of The Underground Railroad: A Novel
Every now and then a book comes along that reaches the marrow of your bones, settles in, and stays forever. This is one. It’s a tour de force, and I don’t say that lightly.” —Oprah Winfrey says, Oprah’s Book Club 2016 Selection
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
Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. Life is hell for all the slaves, but especially bad for Cora; an outcast even among her fellow Africans, she is coming into womanhood—where even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Matters do not go as planned—Cora kills a young white boy who tries to capture her. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted.
In Whitehead’s ingenious conception, the Underground Railroad is no mere metaphor engineers and conductors operate a secret network of tracks and tunnels beneath the Southern soil. Cora and Caesar’s first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
Like the protagonist of AGulliver’s Travels, Cora encounters different worlds at each stage of her journey—hers is an odyssey through time as well as space. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the unique terrors for black people in the pre-Civil War era, his narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. The Underground Railroadis at once a kinetic adventure tale of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a shattering, powerful meditation on the history we all share.
Fiction
Behold the Dreamers: A Novel
by Imbolo Mbue
- 3 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- Selected for 1 Book Club’s Reading List
- A 2017 Oprah Book Club Selection
- 2018 Children’s Africana Book Award Winner or Honoree
- A New York Times Notable Book for 2016
Publication Date: Aug 23, 2016
List Price: $28.00
Format: Hardcover, 400 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9780812998481
Imprint: Knopf
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Read a Description of Behold the Dreamers: A Novel
Imbolo Mbue’s The Longings of Jende Jonga one of two books to earn $1 Million+ advances at the Frankfurt Book Fair read more; “Frankfurt Book Fair 2014: Two Debuts Draw Seven Figures”
For fans of Americanah and The Lowland comes a debut novel about an immigrant couple striving to get ahead as the Great Recession hits home. With profound empathy, keen insight, and sly wit, Imbolo Mbue has written a compulsively readable story about marriage, class, race, and the trapdoors in the American Dream.
Jende Jonga, a Cameroonian immigrant living in Harlem, has come to the United States to provide a better life for himself, his wife, Neni, and their six-year-old son. In the fall of 2007, Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for Clark Edwards, a senior executive at Lehman Brothers. Clark demands punctuality, discretion, and loyalty—and Jende is eager to please. Clark’s wife, Cindy, even offers Neni temporary work at their summer home in the Hamptons. With these opportunities, Jende and Neni can at last gain a foothold in America and imagine a brighter future.
However, the world of great power and privilege conceals troubling secrets, and soon Jende and Neni notice cracks in their employers’ facades.
Then the financial world is rocked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Desperate to keep Jende’s job, which grows more tenuous by the day, the Jongas try to protect the Edwardses from certain truths, even as their own marriage threatens to fall apart. As all four lives are dramatically upended, Jende and Neni are forced to make an impossible choice.
Advance praise for Behold the Dreamers
“A beautiful novel about one African couple starting a new life in a new land, Behold the Dreamers will teach you as much about the promise and pitfalls of life in the United States as about the immigrants who come here in search of the so-called American dream.”—Sonia Nazario, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Enrique’s Journey
Fiction
Homegoing: A Novel
by Yaa Gyasi
- 8 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- Selected for 4 Book Clubs’s Reading Lists
- 2017 American Book Award
- A New York Times Notable Book for 2016
Publication Date: Jun 07, 2016
List Price: $30.00
Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781101947135
Imprint: Random House
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Read a Description of Homegoing: A Novel
Yaa Gyasi’s London Book Fair 2015: In Pre-Fair Deals, Debut Sells to Knopf for Rumored 7 Figures
A riveting, kaleidoscopic debut novel and the beginning of a major career: a novel about race, history, ancestry, love, and time that traces the descendants of two sisters torn apart in eighteenth-century Africa across three hundred years in Ghana and America.
Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into different tribal villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and will live in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the empire. Esi, imprisoned beneath Effia in the Castle’s women’s dungeon and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, will be sold into slavery. Stretching from the tribal wars of Ghana to slavery and the Civil War in America, from the coal mines in the American South to the Great Migration to twentieth-century Harlem, Yaa Gyasi’s novel moves through histories and geographies and captures—with outstanding economy and force—the troubled spirit of our own nation. She has written a modern masterpiece.
Fiction
Ghost: Running for His Life or From It?
by Jason Reynolds
- A Top 10 Book in the “Children’s Books from the 21st Century” Category
- 2 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- A New York Times Notable Book for 2016
Publication Date: Aug 30, 2016
List Price: $16.99
Format: Hardcover, 192 pages
Classification: Fiction
Target Age Group: Middle Grade
ISBN13: 9781481450157
Imprint: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Parent Company: KKR & Co. Inc.
Read a Description of Ghost: Running for His Life or From It?
His new book Ghost is the start of a series for kids about an inner city track team and the different things they’re running from. It’s inspired by Black Lives Matter and his own childhood in DC:
Ghost wants to be the fastest sprinter on his elite middle school track team, but his past is slowing him down in this first electrifying novel of a brand-new series from Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award–winning author Jason Reynolds.
Ghost. Lu. Patina. Sunny. Four kids from wildly different backgrounds with personalities that are explosive when they clash. But they are also four kids chosen for an elite middle school track team—a team that could qualify them for the Junior Olympics if they can get their acts together. They all have a lot to lose, but they also have a lot to prove, not only to each other, but to themselves.
Ghost has a crazy natural talent, but no formal training. If he can stay on track, literally and figuratively, he could be the best sprinter in the city. But Ghost has been running for the wrong reasons—it all starting with running away from his father, who, when Ghost was a very little boy, chased him and his mother through their apartment, then down the street, with a loaded gun, aiming to kill. Since then, Ghost has been the one causing problems—and running away from them—until he meets Coach, an ex-Olympic Medalist who blew his own shot at success by using drugs, and who is determined to keep other kids from blowing their shots at life.
- Castle Crenshaw, aka Ghost’s, life story actually happened to Jason’s best friend. He and his mother were chased by their father at gunpoint, and they had to hide in a 7-11 down the street. Lu, an albino African American character, is also based on a friend of Jason’s.
- The coach is based on Jason’s own coach, a taxi driver who drove kids to practice in the back of his cab.
- Like Ghost, Jason ran track as conditioning for the sport he REALLY cared about – basketball.
- In communities of color, and low-income communities, kids are always running. From sirens, from guns, from their family, from their mom’s discipline. They’re in constant fear. Running isn’t something they’ve had to learn, they’ve just always done it.
- Track is an “individual team” sport. Everyone is competing with themselves (their own scores/times), as well as being part of the team. This mirrors the black experience in the US—everyone has their own individual experiences, but is a part of the larger African American community that is fighting for justice. Truly, everything Jason writes is inspired by that experience and Black Lives Matter.
Fiction
Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life
by Ashley Bryan
- A Top 150 Children’s Book
- Coretta Scott King Award Winning Book 2017
- Kirkus Prize Finalist/Winner 2016
- Newbery Medal Winner or Honor 2018
- A New York Times Notable Book for 2016
Publication Date: Sep 13, 2016
List Price: $17.99
Format: Hardcover, 56 pages
Classification: Fiction
Target Age Group: Middle Grade
ISBN13: 9781481456906
Imprint: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Parent Company: KKR & Co. Inc.
Read a Description of Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life
Using original slave auction and plantation estate documents, Ashley Bryan offers a moving and powerful picture book that contrasts the monetary value of a slave with the priceless value of life experiences and dreams that a slave owner could never take away.
Imagine being looked up and down and being valued as less than chair. Less than an ox. Less than a dress. Maybe about the same as…a lantern.
You, an object. An object to sell.
In his gentle yet deeply powerful way, Ashley Bryan goes to the heart of how a slave is given a monetary value by the slave owner, tempering this with the one thing that CAN’T be bought or sold—dreams. Inspired by the actual will of a plantation owner that lists the worth of each and every one of his “workers”, Bryan has created collages around that document, and others like it. Through fierce paintings and expansive poetry he imagines and interprets each person’s life on the plantation, as well as the life their owner knew nothing about—their dreams and pride in knowing that they were worth far more than an Overseer or Madam ever would guess. Visually epic, and never before done, this stunning picture book is unlike anything you’ve seen.
Fiction
Swing Time
by Zadie Smith
Publication Date: Nov 15, 2016
List Price: $27.00
Format: Hardcover, 464 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781594203985
Imprint: Penguin Press
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Read a Description of Swing Time
An ambitious, exuberant new novel moving from North West London to West Africa, from the multi-award-winning author of White Teeth and On Beauty
Two brown girls dream of being dancers—but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early twenties, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either.
Tracey makes it to the chorus line but struggles with adult life, while her friend leaves the old neighborhood behind, traveling the world as an assistant to a famous singer, Aimee, observing close up how the one percent live.
But when Aimee develops grand philanthropic ambitions, the story moves from London to West Africa, where diaspora tourists travel back in time to find their roots, young men risk their lives to escape into a different future, the women dance just like Tracey—the same twists, the same shakes—and the origins of a profound inequality are not a matter of distant history, but a present dance to the music of time.
Fiction
Here Comes the Sun: A Novel
by Nicole Dennis-Benn
Publication Date: Jul 19, 2016
List Price: $26.95
Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781631491764
Imprint: Liveright
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Parent Company: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Read a Description of Here Comes the Sun: A Novel
In this radiant, highly anticipated debut, a cast of unforgettable women battle for independence while a maelstrom of change threatens their Jamaican village. Capturing the distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, Nicole Dennis- Benn pens a tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide expanse of turquoise seas. At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is ruthlessly determined to shield Thandi from the same fate. When plans for a new hotel threaten their village, Margot sees not only an opportunity for her own financial independence but also perhaps a chance to admit a shocking secret: her forbidden love for another woman. As they face the impending destruction of their community, each woman?fighting to balance the burdens she shoulders with the freedom she craves?must confront long-hidden scars. From a much-heralded new writer, Here Comes the Sun offers a dramatic glimpse into a vibrant, passionate world most outsiders see simply as paradise.