NYT 100 Notable Books of 2025 by Authors of African Descent

Time’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 | Vulture’s Best Books of 2025 | New York Magazine’s Best Books of the Year

Luster meets The Idiot in this riveting debut novel about a volatile friendship between two outsiders who escape their bleak childhoods and enter the glamorous early ’90s art world in New York City, where only one of them can make it.

Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl’s school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria’s orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world.

While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early nineties art world of New York City. There, ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years. Whereas Maria finds early success in New York City as an artist, Ruth stumbles along the fringes of the art world, pulled toward a quieter life of work and marriage. As their lives converge and diverge, they meet in one final and fateful confrontation.

Ruth and Maria’s decades-long friendship interrogates the nature of intimacy, desire, class, and time. What does it mean to be an artist and to be true to oneself? What does it mean to give up on an obsession? Marking the arrival of a sensational new literary talent, Lonely Crowds challenges us to reckon honestly with our own ambitions and the lives we hope to lead.

A New York Times Editors Choice Pick

How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for territory, but for the soul of America.

How to Dodge a Cannonball is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Futureas soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violently insane mother is a bonus.

Anders finds honor as a proud Union flag twirleruntil hes captured. Then he tries life as a diehard Confederateuntil fate asks him to die hard for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. Barely alive, Anders limps into a Black Union regiment in a stolen uniform. While visibly white, he claims to be an octoroon, and they claim to believe him. Only then does his life get truly strange.

His new brothers are even stranger, including a sciencefiction playwright, a Haitian double agent, and a former slave feuding with God. Despite his best efforts, Anders starts seeing the war through their eyes, sparking illtimed questions about who gets to be American or exploit the theater of war. Dennard Dayles satire spares no one as doomed charges, draft riots, gleeful arms dealers, and native suppression campaigns test everyones definition of loyalty.

Uproariously funny and revelatory, How to Dodge a Cannonball asks if America is worth fighting for. And then answers loudly. Read it while its still legal.

Baldwin: A Love Story, the first major biography of James Baldwin in three decades, reveals how profoundly the writers personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwins most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships: with his mentor, the Black American painter Beauford Delaney; with his lover and muse, the Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger; and with his collaborators, the famed Turkish actor Engin Cezzar and the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, whose long-overlooked significance as Baldwins last great love is explored in these pages for the first time.

Nicholas Boggs shows how Baldwin drew on all the complex forces within these relationshipsgeographical, cultural, political, artistic, and eroticand alchemized them into novels, essays, and plays that speak truth to power and had an indelible impact on the civil rights movement and on Black and queer literary history. Richly immersive, Baldwin: A Love Story follows the writers creative journey between Harlem, Paris, Switzerland, the southern United States, Istanbul, Africa, the South of France, and beyond. In so doing, it magnifies our understanding of the public and private lives of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century, whose contributions only continue to grow in influence.

A New York Times Editors Choice Pick

Powerful [and] fascinating.The Washington Post

The remarkable story of Edward McCabe, a Black man who tried to establish a Black state within the United States.

In this paradigm-shattering work of American history, Caleb Gayle recounts the extraordinary tale of Edward McCabe, a Black man who championed the audacious idea to create a state within the Union governed by and for Black peopleand the racism, politics, and greed that thwarted him.

As the sweeping changes and brief glimpses of hope brought by the Civil War and Reconstruction began to wither, anger at the opportunities available to newly freed Black people was on the rise. As a result, both Blacks and whites searched for new places to settle. That was when Edward McCabe, a Black businessman and a rising political star in the American West, set in motion his plans to found a state within the Union for Black people to live in and govern. His chosen site: Oklahoma, a place that the U.S. government had deeded to Indigenous people in the 1830s when it forced thousands of them to leave their homes under Indian Removal, which became known as the Trail of Tears.

McCabe lobbied politicians in Washington, D.C., Kansas, and elsewhere as he exhorted Black people to move to Oklahoma to achieve their dreams of self-determination and land ownership. His rising profile as a leader and spokesman for Black people as well as his willingness to confront white politicians led him to become known as Black Moses. And like his biblical counterpart, McCabe nearly made it to the promised land but was ultimately foiled by politics, business interests, and the growing ambitions of white settlers who also wanted the land.

In Black Moses, Gayle brings to vivid life the world of Edward McCabe: the Black people who believed in his dream of a Black state, the white politicians who didnt, and the larger challenges of confronting the racism and exclusion that bedeviled Black peoples attempts to carve a place in America for themselves. Gayle draws from extraordinary research and reporting to reveal an America that almost was.

A landmark reinterpretation of the civil rights movement that challenges reductive heroic narratives of the 1950s and 1960s and invigorates new debates and possibilities for the future of the struggle for liberation.

We are all familiar with the romantic vision of the civil rights movement: a moment when heroic African Americans and their allies triumphed over racial oppression through courageous protest, forging a new consensus in American life and law. But what are the effects of this celebratory storytelling? What happens when a living revolt against injustice becomes an embalmed museum piece?

In this innovative work, Brandon Terry develops a novel theory of interpretation to show how competing accounts of the civil rights movement circulate through politics and political philosophy. The dominant narrative is romantic. This arc of justice narrative is found in popular histories, the speeches of Barack Obama, and even the writings of the liberal philosopher John Rawls. Despite being public orthodoxy, these romantic visions are exhausted and unpersuasive on their own terms. The breakdown of the authority of this history of justice has created space for a rival ironic mode, embodied in the political ideas of Afropessimism. While offering a sympathetic critique, Terry ultimately finds Afropessimist thought self-undermining and unworkable.

Instead, he argues, the civil rights movement is best understood in tragic terms. By challenging the attachment to triumphant pasts, Terry demonstrates that tragedy exemplifies what the civil rights movement has been and can still be. Provocative and original, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope offers an optimistic political vision without naïveté, to train our judgment and resilience in the face of reasonable despair.

In 2007, Michael Thomas launched into the literary world with his award-winning first novel Man Gone Down, a beautiful and devastating story of a Black father trying to claim a piece of the American Dream. Called powerful and moving . . . an impressive success, by Kaiama L. Glover on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, Thomas debut introduced a writer of prodigious and rare talent. In his long-awaited encore and first work of nonfiction, The Broken King, Thomas explores fathers and sons, lovers and the beloved, trauma and recovery, success and failure in a unique, urgent, and timeless memoir.

The title is borrowed from T.S. Eliots line in Little Gidding: If you came at night like a broken king, and the work ponders the process of being broken. Akin to Baldwins The Fire Next Time or Nabokovs Speak, Memory, Thomas memoir unfolds through six powerful, interlocking and overlaying sections focusing on the lives of five men: his fathera philosopher, Boston Red Sox fan, and absent parent; his estranged older brother; his two sons growing up in Brooklyn; and always, heartbreakingly himself. At the center of The Broken King is the story of Thomas own breakdown, a result of inherited family history and his own experiences, from growing up Black in the Boston suburbs to publishing a prize-winning novel with the house of Beckett.

Every page of The Broken King rings with the impact of Americas sweeping struggle with race and class, education, and family, and builds to a brave, meticulous articulation of a creative minds journey into and out of madness.

A sweeping history of one of the nations most important African American churches and a profound story of courage and grace amid the fight for racial justicefrom Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Kevin Sack

A masterpiece a dense, rich, captivating narrative, featuring vivid prose expansive, inspiring and hugely important. The New York Times (Editors Choice)

Race, religion, and terror combine for an extraordinary story of America. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., bestselling author of Begin Again

Few people beyond South Carolinas Lowcountry knew of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in CharlestonMother Emanuelbefore the night of June 17, 2015, when a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist walked into Bible study and slaughtered the churchs charismatic pastor and eight other worshippers. Although the shooter had targeted Mother Emanuelthe first A.M.E. church in the Southto agitate racial strife, he did not anticipate the aftermath: an outpouring of forgiveness from the victims families and a reckoning with the divisions of caste that have afflicted Charleston and the South since the earliest days of European settlement.

Mother Emanuel explores the fascinating history that brought the church to that moment and the depth of the desecration committed in its fellowship hall. It reveals how African Methodism was cultivated from the harshest American soil, and how Black suffering shaped forgiveness into both a religious practice and a survival tool. Kevin Sack, who has written about race in his native South for more than four decades, uses the church to trace the long arc of Black life in the city where nearly half of enslaved Africans disembarked in North America and where the Civil War began. Through the microcosm of one congregation, he explores the development of a unique practice of Christianity, from its daring breakaway from white churches in 1817, through the traumas of Civil War and Reconstruction, to its critical role in the Civil Rights Movement and beyond.

At its core, Mother Emanuel is an epic tale of perseverance, not just of a congregation but of a people who withstood enslavement, Jim Crow, and all manner of violence with an unbending faith.

From award-winning poet Kevin Young comes When I Fly Away, a profound collection of poems chronicling the personal and national landscape of loss, renewal, and resilience. Written over a span of sixteen years, the collection captures beauty and difficulty alike, engaging memory, myth, and music to explore the cycles that define our lives and histories.

The journey begins in the bayous of Louisiana, tracing the poets family legacy before traveling into the philosophical depths of grief and hope. In the sequence All Souls, Young conjures haunting imagery of prayer and yearning, writing of The whale / who finds the shore / & our poor prayers.

Another key sequence, The Two-Headed Nightingale, is voiced by Millie-Christine McCoy, the conjoined African American twins born into slavery and later famed performers. Their complex inner lives and harmonized identities are captured in lines like: As one we sang, / we spake / She was the body / I the soul / Without one / Perishes the whole.

In Darkling, a sweeping poetic cycle inspired by Dantes Divine Comedy, Young reimagines Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, exploring isolation, memory, and salvation. He writes, Its like a language, / loss / learnt only / by livingthere, threading classical reference with contemporary resonance. He calls for subversion of sentimental mourning, declaring, dont dare sing Amazing Grace but rather, Just burn the whole / Town on down.

When I Fly Away is a masterwork by one of Americas most celebrated poets, uniting heartache, humor, and cultural insight into an unforgettable symphony of sorrow and strength.