bipoc fiction
books by bipoc i’ve read & highly recommend
Items in this hypelist
Finished
Multiple Choice
Alejandro Zambra · 2016
This Is How You Lose the Time War
Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone · 2020
A Poor Man’s Prose
Jahid Wilson Jr · 2025
The Wicked and the Willing
Lianyu Tan · 2022
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler · 2003
The River Has Roots
Amal El-Mohtar · 2025
<p><b>AN INDIE NEXT AND LIBRARYREADS PICK!</b><br><b><i><br>The River Has Roots</i> is the hugely anticipated solo debut of the <i>New York Times</i> bestselling and Hugo Award winning author Amal El-Mohtar. Follow the river Liss to the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, and meet two sisters who cannot be separated, even in death.</b><br><br><b>The hardcover edition features beautiful interior illustrations and a foil case stamp.</b><br><br><b>"Half delicious murder ballad, half beguiling love story." </b>—Holly Black • <b>"</b><b>An absolute must-read." </b>—T. Kingfisher • <b>"</b><b>Every sentence sings!" </b>—Sarah Beth Durst • <b>"Utterly enchanting." </b>—Fonda Lee • <b>"A story that outlasts itself." </b>—Alix E. Harrow • <b>"Truly exquisite." </b>—Zoraida Córdova • "<b>A</b><b> beautiful, musical, and loving story."</b> —Emma Törzs<br><br><i><b>“Oh what is stronger than a death? Two sisters singing with one breath.”</b></i><br><br>In the small town of Thistleford, on the edge of Faerie, dwells the mysterious Hawthorn family.<br><br>There, they tend and harvest the enchanted willows and honour an ancient compact to sing to them in thanks for their magic. None more devotedly than the family’s latest daughters, Esther and Ysabel, who cherish each other as much as they cherish the ancient trees.<br><br>But when Esther rejects a forceful suitor in favor of a lover from the land of Faerie, not only the sisters’ bond but also their lives will be at risk...</p>
Earthlings
Sayaka Murata · 2021
From the beloved author of cult sensation Convenience Store Woman, which has now sold more than one million copies worldwide and has been translated into thirty-three languages, comes a spellbinding and otherworldly novel about a woman who believes she is an alien<br/>Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman was one of the most unusual and refreshing bestsellers of recent years, depicting the life of a thirty-six-year-old clerk in a Tokyo convenience store. Now, in Earthlings, Sayaka Murata pushes at the boundaries of our ideas of social conformity in this brilliantly imaginative, intense, and absolutely unforgettable novel.<br/>As a child, Natsuki doesn’t fit in with her family. Her parents favor her sister, and her best friend is a plush toy hedgehog named Piyyut, who talks to her. He tells her that he has come from the planet Popinpobopia on a special quest to help her save the Earth. One summer, on vacation with her family and her cousin Yuu in her grandparents’ ramshackle wooden house in the mountains of Nagano, Natsuki decides that she must be an alien, which would explain why she can’t seem to fit in like everyone else. Later, as a grown woman, living a quiet life with her asexual husband, Natsuki is still pursued by dark shadows from her childhood, and decides to flee the “baby factory” of society for good, searching for answers about the vast and frightening mysteries of the universe—answers only Natsuki has the power to uncover.<br/>Dreamlike, sometimes shocking, and always strange and wonderful, Earthlings asks what it means to be happy in a stifling world, and cements Sayaka Murata’s status as a master chronicler of the outsider experience and our own uncanny universe.
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2023
So Long a Letter
Mariama Bâ · 2012
The Sound of Waves
Yukio Mishima · 1980
Girls Burn Brighter
Shobha Rao · 2018
Freshwater
Akwaeke Emezi · 2018
Riot Baby
Tochi Onyebuchi · 2020
Black Girl Unlimited
Echo Brown · 2020
The Black Flamingo
Dean Atta · 2019
Night of the Mannequins
Stephen Graham Jones · 2020
Our Violent Ends
Chloe Gong · 2021
These Violent Delights
Chloe Gong · 2020
Whichwood
Tahereh Mafi · 2017
Furthermore
Tahereh Mafi · 2016
This Woven Kingdom
Tahereh Mafi · 2022
The Truth According to Ember
Danica Nava · 2024
Touch
Adania Shibli · 2013
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong · 2021
<b>A <i>New York Times </i>bestseller <b>• Nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction <b>• Ocean Vuong’s debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, a first love, and the redemptive power of storytelling</b></b><br><br><b><i>New York Times </i>Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century</b> <br><br><b>“A lyrical work of self-discovery that’s shockingly intimate and insistently universa</b>l…N<b>ot so much briefly gorgeous as permanently stunning.” —Ron Charles, <i>The Washington Post</i><br><br>“This is one of the best novels I’ve ever read...Ocean Vuong is a master. This book a masterpiece.”<b>—Tommy Orange, author of <i>There There </i>and <i>Wandering Stars</i></b></b><br><br></b><i>On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous</i> is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, <i>On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous</i> is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. <br><br>With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.<br><br><b>Named a Best Book of the Year by: <br><i>GQ, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Library Journal, TIME</i>, <i>Esquire, The Washington Post</i>, Apple, <i>Good Housekeeping, The New Yorker</i>, The New York Public Library, Elle.com, <i>The Guardian</i>, The A.V. Club, NPR, Lithub, <i>Entertainment Weekly</i>, Vogue.com, <i>The San Francisco Chronicle, Mother Jones, Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, </i>and more! <br></b>
Last Night at the Telegraph Club
Malinda Lo · 2021
Yellowface
R. F. Kuang · 2023
Babel
R. F. Kuang · 2022
<p>Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller from the author of The Poppy War </p><p>“Absolutely phenomenal. One of the most brilliant, razor-sharp books I've had the pleasure of reading that isn't just an alternative fantastical history, but an interrogative one; one that grabs colonial history and the Industrial Revolution, turns it over, and shakes it out.” -- Shannon Chakraborty, bestselling author of The City of Brass</p><p>From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire.</p><p>Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal.</p><p>1828. Robin Swift, orphaned by cholera in Canton, is brought to London by the mysterious Professor Lovell. There, he trains for years in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Chinese, all in preparation for the day he’ll enroll in Oxford University’s prestigious Royal Institute of Translation—also known as Babel.</p><p>Babel is the world's center for translation and, more importantly, magic. Silver working—the art of manifesting the meaning lost in translation using enchanted silver bars—has made the British unparalleled in power, as its knowledge serves the Empire’s quest for colonization.</p><p>For Robin, Oxford is a utopia dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. But knowledge obeys power, and as a Chinese boy raised in Britain, Robin realizes serving Babel means betraying his motherland. As his studies progress, Robin finds himself caught between Babel and the shadowy Hermes Society, an organization dedicated to stopping imperial expansion. When Britain pursues an unjust war with China over silver and opium, Robin must decide…</p><p>Can powerful institutions be changed from within, or does revolution always require violence? </p>
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 2006
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini · 2011
Home Is Not a Country
Safia Elhillo · 2022
The Empress of Salt and Fortune
Nghi Vo · 2020
The Only Good Indians
Stephen Graham Jones · 2021
Ceremony
Leslie Marmon Silko · 2006
Long Way Down
Jason Reynolds · 2017
The Poet X
Elizabeth Acevedo · 2018
<p>Winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Michael L. Printz Award, and the Pura Belpré Award!</p><p>Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth. </p><p>Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking.</p><p>But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. </p><p>With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems. </p><p>Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.</p><p>“Crackles with energy and snaps with authenticity and voice.” —Justina Ireland, author of Dread Nation</p><p>“An incredibly potent debut.” —Jason Reynolds, author of the National Book Award Finalist Ghost</p><p>“Acevedo has amplified the voices of girls en el barrio who are equal parts goddess, saint, warrior, and hero.” —Ibi Zoboi, author of American Street</p><p>This young adult novel, a selection of the Schomburg Center's Black Liberation Reading List, is an excellent choice for accelerated tween readers in grades 6 to 8.</p><p>Plus don't miss Elizabeth Acevedo's With the Fire on High and Clap When You Land!</p>
Clap When You Land
Elizabeth Acevedo · 2020
Little Fires Everywhere
Celeste Ng · 2017
Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid · 2020
But Not Too Bold
Hache Pueyo · 2025
Felix Ever After
Kacen Callender · 2020
Reading
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston · 2006
Red at the Bone
Jacqueline Woodson · 2019
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison · 2007
