Here are 100 books that Seven Moves fans have personally recommended if you like
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It took years of being an undercover writer turned book blogger for me to realize just how much of what's considered African fiction is Western publishers' profiteering efforts to churn out novels centered on colonial trauma after postcolonial trauma tailored to white audiences. When does the African reader get a break? When do we read books that aren't geared towards African pain? When I set out to write my book, I wanted to write a novel that documented the rot in publishing and how commercialisation of the post-colonial trauma trend has been to the detriment of not just the African reader but African writers as well.
Though this book is largely about the toxic extramarital affair between a young black girl and a married white man, it shines light on the competitive work environment between editors in publishing.
It also becomes satire in its depiction of what kind of works from Black authors publishers are keen on commissioning. Cue in its critique of the proliferation of slave narratives in publishing, and this funny, sexy, and deeply sad novel will leave a huge mark on readers.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
WINNER of the NBCC John Leonard Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020 A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The New York Times Book Review, O Magazine, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, Shondaland, Boston Globe, and many more!
"So delicious that it feels illicit . . . Raven Leilani’s first novel reads like summer: sentences like ice that crackle or…
I’m obsessed with obsession; with the nature of intimate relationships. If I could obsess about a topic as easily and naturally as I can about a human, I’d probably have five or six advanced degrees. As a writer I’m most frequently drawn to third-person limited because I love the marriage of intimacy and distance it can create. It's that marriage that confounds me; the dark inner spaces contained by the people we love.
Gender takes a backseat to obsession when college student Regina becomes enamored with Professor Nicholas Brodeur, before finding a deeper romantic connection with his volatile wife. Choi nails the mix of awe and attraction that can characterize the relationship between a young person and an older counterpart. Lyrical and emotionally immersive, this academic novel depicts a regular young woman who believes (as we all do) that the strength of her passion is unique.
An intimately charged novel of desire and disaster from the National Book Award-winning author of Trust Exercise and A Person of Interest
Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He's said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He's condemned on the walls of the women's restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty-or his charismatic, volatile wife.
I’m a psychologist by profession and I’m fascinated by the way personalities develop and change with life events. In novels, I’m drawn towards wounded characters who are searching for something to make them feel whole. Common issues I see in my psychotherapy work include imposter syndrome, low self-esteem, feelings of not being good enough. Many people try to hide their vulnerability behind a mask, faking confidence or bravado, or pretending to be something they’re not. But these fictional characters take it up a level, one small step at a time, until the lies build and they end up in a web of deceit with no way out.
We’re straight in the story from page one, experiencing the intensity of the toxic relationship Louise has with her new best friend – a woman she’s only known ten days. Louise has a complex personality, her low self-esteem leading to constant self-assessment. But boy, how she changes! I liked the way the author breaks the fourth wall by directing comments to the reader, the foreshadowing allowing us to know what’s coming before the characters. Not my usual choice, as the novel is set in America with a cast under 30, but I enjoyed the build in tension as I waited for Louise to be caught out.
One of the Best Books of the Year: Janet Maslin, The New York Times Vulture NPR
"Social Creature is a wicked original with echoes of the greats (Patricia Highsmith, Gillian Flynn)." —Janet Maslin, The New York Times
For readers of Gillian Flynn and Donna Tartt, a dark, propulsive and addictive debut thriller, splashed with all the glitz and glitter of New York City.
They go through both bottles of champagne right there on the High Line, with nothing but the stars over them... They drink and Lavinia tells Louise about all the places they will go together, when they finish…
I’m obsessed with obsession; with the nature of intimate relationships. If I could obsess about a topic as easily and naturally as I can about a human, I’d probably have five or six advanced degrees. As a writer I’m most frequently drawn to third-person limited because I love the marriage of intimacy and distance it can create. It's that marriage that confounds me; the dark inner spaces contained by the people we love.
This book was ahead of its time. This YA novel was written in 1978 but I found it on a shelf in my local library in 1992 when I was a queer preteen. An elliptical narrative about the burgeoning romantic relationship between two teenage girls, the novel captures a nameless yearning I understood without knowing why. Though the narrative felt to me illicit, it wasn’t prurient but rather deeply felt and authentic to the experience of a teenager coming to understand her sexuality as it crystalizes around one compelling friend.
Val and Chloe don't fit in at their fancy private school in Manhattan. Together, they ditch school, visit cemeteries and thrift shops and have sleepovers during which they confide all their secret thoughts. Lately, Val has all kinds of questions. Especially about sex. So Val turns to the two people who have always given her the most honest answers possible: her mother and Chloe. Unfortunately, not even Val's mother-an adult!-has all the answers. Val starts to think that maybe she's not "normal" at all. Because she has some other feelings for Chloe. Feelings that she never expected to have. Would…
I was a weird kid. Often accused of ‘thinking too much’, I cut my literary teeth on Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Phillip K Dick, and Shirley Jackson. Raised on their dark milk, I grew up wanting more than hollow scares and mindless eviscerations. Don’t just give me a scary story, give me a scary story that resonates, one that raises a lens to our world, our history, the rules we’re asked to live by. Unsettle me, make me think. Most of all, give me characters worth my precious time. These are the kind of stories I endeavor to write and the ones I most enjoy reading. I hope you enjoy this small selection as much as I have.
More beautifully written magic realism, with compelling characters and a fascinating plot. Fowley-Doyle uses the obliqueness of the supernatural and the compelling tropes of a mystery story to explore Ireland's troubled history with women and children. There's something of the road trip to this one, with a warm, supportive, found-family providing kindness and companionship to the main character in a story that otherwise might be too bleak to bear. Release yourself to the prose and to the experience, let the book carry you. It’ll be worth the journey.
On Deena's seventeenth birthday, the day she finally comes out to her family, her wild and mysterious sister Mandy is seen leaping from a cliff. The family is heartbroken, but not surprised. The women…
I’m a writer, editor, and self-proclaimed shoe fanatic who loves finding opportunities to traipse through the streets of New York like Carrie in Sex and the City. With an undergrad degree in journalism from Howard University and a graduate degree from Georgetown University, I started a blog in 2007 about shoes, politics, and relationships that centered on my personal experiences with all three. Since then, I’ve contributed opinion articles to The Washington Post, Blavity, and more. My debut novel, The Shoe Diaries, was released in January 2022 by Harlequin Special Edition. The sequel, Bloom Where You’re Planted, will be released on May 24, 2022.
A contemporary YA novel, this book will still appeal to all the adults who can remember what it was like trying to figure out who you were as a teenager, how your friends fit into your life, and what it means to shake things up but still maintain who you are at your core. Main character, Codi Teller, is lucky to have two very close friends by her side through it all, but she develops an additional, unexpected friendship with cool kid, Ricky, when she stumbles upon him kissing another boy at a party. Ricky brings Codi into his world full of new experiences, late nights, and a cute girl named Lydia who Codi definitely has a crush on.
From author Kelly Quindlen comes a poignant and deeply relatable story about friendship, self-acceptance, and what it means to be a Real Teenager. Late to the Party is an ode to late bloomers and wallflowers everywhere.
Seventeen is nothing like Codi Teller imagined.
She’s never crashed a party, never stayed out too late. She’s never even been kissed. And it’s not just because she’s gay. It’s because she and her two best friends, Maritza and JaKory, spend more time in her basement watching Netflix than engaging with the outside world.
So when Maritza and JaKory suggest crashing a party, Codi…
I’m a novelist and a professor of black queer and feminist literature at Georgetown University. But the truth is, my connection to these books goes deeper than that. These books give me life. When I was a little girl, I spent more days than I can count scouring my mother’s small black feminist library in the basement of our home in Harlem, poring over the stories of girls like me: fat, black, queer girls who longed to see themselves written in literature and history. Now I get to create stories like these myself, and share them with others. It’s a dream job, and a powerful one. It thrills me every time.
If you’re not familiar with Pat Parker yet, you’re in for a treat.
This collection gathers the published and unpublished writing of a badass literary powerhouse who has yet to get her full due. Written from the 1960s-1980s, Parker’s poems, stories, essays, and plays give a foundation of black queer and feminist thinking.
With striking language and irresistible humor, Parker and her irreverent characters shed light on the complexities of gender identity, state violence, nonmonogamy, pleasure, and belonging. Parker’s work is both ahead of its time and right on time, reminding us that history—and our power to shape it—are less distant than we think.
Poetry. Drama. California Interest. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. "Parker stayed woke to black suffering, violence against black bodies—especially those of black women—to the suffering engendered by multiple, egregious oppressions. With THE COMPLETE WORKS OF PAT PARKER, we are allowed an opportunity to historicize Pat Parker's significance to black women's literary traditions, lesbian erotics, to black queer struggles and black feminism, and to global social justice movements. She was in her time. Now, with this important text, she will be in all time to come." —Alexis De Veaux
"As the Black Lives Matter movement calls attention to the…
I’m passionate about young adult sapphic romance books because this is something I wished I would have read in high school. If I had novels similar to these when I was growing up I might have realized that I identify as queer sooner and it could have helped me understand more about myself. Because of this, I’ve been an avid reader, and writer, of sapphic young adult romances. If it’s sapphic, send it my way. I hope you enjoy these sapphic novels as much as I have!
You Should See Me in a Crown is such a cute sapphic romance story, set around the fact that both the main character, Liz, and her love interest/new girl, Mack, are both running for homecoming queen to win a scholarship.
This book was a breath of fresh air because there were also real problems and insecurities brought up that sometimes are overlooked, making it the characters seem so real.
Liz Lighty has always believed she's too black, too poor, too awkward to shine in her small, rich, prom-obsessed mid-western town. But it's okay-Liz has a plan that will get her out of Campbell, Indiana, forever: attend the uber-elite Pennington College, play in their world-famous orchestra, and become a doctor.But when the financial aid she was counting on unexpectedly falls through, Liz's plans come crashing down... until she's reminded of her school's scholarship for prom King and Queen. There's nothing Liz wants to do less than endure a gauntlet of social media trolls, catty competitors, and humiliating public events, but…
I grew up in a small, rural community that is perhaps best defined by cold, grey, rainy days – perfect reading weather. I developed an interest in learning about different places and cultures through books. Then I started traveling and my interest turned into a passion, that transformed my educational journey. I completed a Masters and PhD in Anthropology and did my field research for my degree in Australia and Nepal. I still love to learn about new cultures, though the children have meant less traveling and more adventuring via books!
Girl, Woman, Other was the book I recommended to all my friends and family this year in our Christmas newsletter (yes, we are one of those families).
It follows twelve characters across two generations in the United Kingdom. Massive cultural shifts occur, socio-economic status changes, and children grow up.
At first glance, this might not appear to be a book about cross-cultural interactions but the relationship between the mother and daughter at the centre of the story highlight the monumental shifts that can occur in a lifetime.
“A must-read about modern Britain and womanhood . . . An impressive, fierce novel about the lives of black British families, their struggles, pains, laughter, longings and loves . . . Her style is passionate, razor-sharp, brimming with energy and humor. There is never a single moment of dullness in this book and the pace does not allow you to turn away from its momentum.” —Booker Prize Judges
Bernardine Evaristo is the winner of the 2019 Booker Prize and the first black woman to receive this highest literary honor in the English language.…
Before I became a writer, I worked for a time in the violence against women sector, and I started to see how violence against women was normalised or sanctioned by a complex matrix of laws, norms, and ideas that stick to our society like a spider’s web. I wanted to do my part in unpicking the web—and for me, as a writer, that comes in the form of beginning to break down simplistic stories and archetypes about what women should be, and what they historically might have been, in favour of a liberated future where the true potential of half the human race can be dreamed of, and realised.
I write about violence against women, because I think it’s important and overlooked. Toto Among the Murderers takes place in the north of England in the late 70s and early 80s, when the country was shadowed by the presence of multiple serial killers. It sounds dark, right? But this is a paen to young womanhood, to the fun and freedom that can be inhabited even within the constraints of a world that, too often, allows women to be harmed.
'Vividly portrays the human face of young women on the margins of society, women who defy being statistics, who have their own stories and loves to tell' Sophie Ward
WINNER OF THE PORTICO PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE OCKHAM AWARDS
It is 1973 and Jude - known to her friends as Toto - has just graduated from art school and moves into a house in a run-down part of Leeds. Jude is a chaotic wild child who flirts with the wrong kind of people, drinks too much and gets stoned too often. Never happy to stay in one place for very…
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