35 Novels By Women Of Color
With two notable exceptions (Trevor Noah's Born A Crime and Dane Huckelbridge’s Castle of Water) for the past couple of years I have only been reading books by women authors. And after being blown away by Yaa Gyasi’s stunning Homegoing, and while currently devouring Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, I realized that all I really want to read right now is novels by women of color. Why? Because just through Homegoing and Pachinko alone, I have developed a deeper sense of the massively different scope of human experience in different cultures and I feel that continuing to learn -- even through fiction -- is crucial. I recently put out a call for favorite novels by women of color and am so grateful to my smart friends (especially Thien-Kim Lam for providing a ton of recommendations!) for weighing in. Here are 35 novels by women of color. I am basically going to be working my way through this list through the remainder of this year!
For some reason the Internet is being grumpy and not showing that the below titles are linked, but they are! Just click on the title and you can see the title on Amazon!
2. ADICHIE, Chimamanda Ngozi: Americanah
3. ALI, S. K.: Saints and Misfits
7. BUTLER, Octavia: Parable of the Sower
9. BUTLER, Octavia: Xenogenesis Trilogy
10. CHEN, Kirstin: Soy Sauce for Beginners
11. DANTICAT, Edwidge: Breath, Eyes, Memory
12. ESQUIVEL, Laura: Like Water for Chocolate
13. FRANCIS-SHARMA, Lauren: Til the Well Runs Dry
Book jacket images via Amazon
18. JEMISIN, N. K.: The Fifth Season
19. JONES, Tayari: An American Marriage
20. LAHIRI, Jhumpa: Interpreter of Maladies
21. LEE, Janice Y. K.: The Piano Teacher
22. LEE, Min Jin: Pachinko
23. NG, Celeste: Everything I Never Told You
24. NG, Celeste: Little Fires Everywhere
25. NGUYEN, Bich Minh: Pioneer Girl
26. OKORAFOR, Nnedi: Binti series
27. OKORAFOR, Nnedi: Who Fears Death
28. PACHICO, Julianne: The Lucky Ones
29. RAI, Alisha: Hate To Want You (and here’s Thien-Kim’s book review of this smoldering title!)
30. RANKINE, Claudia: Citizen
31. TAN, Amy: The Valley of Amazement
32: THOMAS, Angie: The Hate U Give
33. THUY, Kim: Mãn
34. WARD, Jesmyn: Sing, Unburied, Sing
35. WARD, Jesmyn: Salvage the Bones
Disclosure: Amazon affiliate links are included above so if you shop these links you'll support this site at no extra cost to you (thank you!). However, the list is also intentionally arranged alphabetically by author surname so it's easy for you to browse the stacks at your local library. Yay for libraries!