The most recommended books about Black women

Every panel of Hot Comb is full of music and movement. The dialogue is so perfectly observed it's like sitting on a park bench with a good old friend and overhearing conversations as they pass by. Some of the stories are directly autobiographical I think, and some are not, but they all feel very real and the dynamics of the relationships very familiar. A beautiful and sharp book about small personal everyday things and how huge and political they really are.

I love linked stories. Three black women, a successful executive, a flight attendant, and, a refugee, are linked to the CEO of Sweden's largest marketing firm.

At the time I read this book, my husband was the only Black executive at a Swedish company and it was extremely helpful in understanding the work culture of his company. I also connected with each of the women as they faced the harsh realities of what it means to be a Black woman in a White dominated society.

There was a resilience that persisted in each of them despite instances of racism, classism, tokenism, fetishization, and suicide. Though I found the story disturbing and sad at times, I was also encouraged by the strength these women exhibited in striving to value themselves. 

There are books that tell you about a subject and there are books that tell you about yourself and the subject.

Hubbard, a masterful writer, does the latter in this riveting manifesto that explores the complicated relationship of hip-hop culture and Black women’s experiences consuming it.

Reading it as a man gave me a mirror into how complicit we have been to several problematic trends related to gender, race, and the entertainment industry.

It’s more than just a reality check about sexism and misogynoir in hip-hop – but a call to action for all of us to do better and be better to the most vulnerable amongst us. 

Erika Edwards decenters the study of the African diaspora in Argentina from Buenos Aires by studying Cordoba, at the geographic heart of this country. The author employs gender as a structuring category of understanding conceptions of race, as she examines the actions of Black women who shaped their own sexual experiences and marriage patterns, creating new forms of identity based on the changing conceptions of race and law at the time, as Argentina was transitioning from colony to nation. In doing so, Edwards charters a process beginning in nineteenth-century Cordoba, which then became one of the keys to understanding a gendered conception of Blackness in modern Argentina. 

Discovering my affinity for Historical Fiction, and then discovering the writings of Vanessa Riley was a dream come true.

Island Queen hit all the right buttons for my writing spirit. It was lyrical, poetic, engaging, and one of the most beautifully written books in my personal library. It was storytelling at its very best and I’d recommend this book for that reason alone. But it also has great personal significance for me.

My 85-year-old mother who only learned to read late in life was an avid reader. These past few years her reading has slowed, the process becoming difficult for her to do. I recommended audiobooks for her, and Island Queen was her first. Watching her become completely lost in the story, tears sometimes streaming down her face, or the lilt of a giggle rolling off her lips was everything.

This is a story that tugs at your heartstrings and… show more.

Jessica Marie Johnson’s award-winning Wicked Flesh is a masterpiece of historical writing that takes an in-depth look at the stories of Black women in search for freedom. Connecting the lower Mississippi Valley to an Atlantic World dominated by slave trading, the intimate histories of Black women take center stage as Johnson chronicles the ways they sought to counter the power white men attempted to claim over their bodies.  

Book of the Little Axe follows one woman at two ends of her life, spanning from the late 1700s to the early 1800s.

One thread follows who she will become—“Ma,” wife to an Apsáalooke man and mother to three children—and the woman she was before, “Rosa,” a daughter and sister in Trinidad. A third thread follows a man named Creadon’s diary.

This book explores so many important and complex topics like what it means to be family, what it means to belong, and what it means to accept yourself. I loved how deep Francis-Sharma dives into the feelings of shame and pride and fear that the characters feel.

I felt those same things and it made me physically ache for them.

A fascinating exploration into the lives of three women ignored by history, the mothers of Martin Luther King Jr, James Baldwin, and Malcolm X. By tracing the intellectual, political, and emotional strands of each woman’s life, Anna Malaika Tubbs uncovers hidden complexities within black motherhood that illuminate our understanding of the past while also shedding light on the overlooked contributions of black women today.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a “queer, black feminist love evangelist and a marine mammal apprentice,” has created an exuberant book—impossible to categorize. Undrowned is everything—a dramatic account of marine mammals’ struggles, a meditation, a call for action, a manifesto, a workbook with activities. Referencing the middle passage as a Black feminist, Gumbs considers the enmeshment of breathing, drowning, and undrowning, looking to “marine mammal kindred” as “teachers, mentors, guides.” I was deeply moved by how this book passionately voices love for whales, dolphins, and seals. But this love isn’t sentimental—it is active. The chapters call readers to do things, such as “listen,” asking how can we “listen across species, across extinction, across harm?” I marvel at Gumbs’ fierce, unabashed love for marine mammals. Gumbs inspires me to take more risks for others.

This travelogue is so exquisitely written it is possible to admire it simply for its lyricism. But it’s much more than a travelogue. Embedded in the book are familial narratives, personal accounts, musings about other writers – Coetzee, Naipaul, Walcott, Galeano, for instance – all with the intent to chart the black diasporic experience. It’s a deeply personal book, yet studded with brilliant observations on belonging. “Black experience in any modern city or town in the Americas is a haunting. One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes. History is already seated in the chair in the empty room when one arrives.” This book is best read slowly, savouring its insight.