For thriller aficionados, this novel by Alyssa Cole (best-known as a romance author) is sure to keep you on your toes and anxiously turning the pages. Brooklyn native Sydney Green has been watching in dismay as her neighborhood starts rapidly changing: new condos are being built, for-sale signs are springing up on lawns practically overnight, and neighbors are moving away without so much as a goodbye. In a desperate attempt to hold on to her community, Sydney launches a walking tour to teach people about the neighborhood’s history, but as she digs into local history, she starts to suspect that her new neighbors may not be as friendly as they seem. What happened to her old neighbors? Where are all these new, and wealthy, people coming from? And can Sydney keep some secrets of her own as she tries to uncover the truth about her neighborhood?

In this newly published essay, Sybrina Fulton, the mother of unarmed 17-year-old Florida high school student Trayvon Martin, who was fatally shot in February 2012 by a man later acquitted of murder, reflects on her son’s death and the changes that have—and have not—occurred since. She discusses her grief, her reaction to the nationwide protests and demands for justice his murder sparked, and her own subsequent activisim. The essay has a foreword by noted civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represented the family of George Floyd, the unarmed Black man killed by a white Minneapolis police officer in May 2020.

This is a warm-hearted and moving romance about an Oxford-educated British Nigerian woman in her 30s who seems to have the ideal life: a well-paying career, great friends, independence. The only snag; her traditional mother and aunties constantly ask her, “Yinka, where is your huzband?” Her situation is apparently so desperate that her aunties have begun praying for her to be delivered from singledom. Yinka, however, prefers to wait for love to find her, but as her cousin’s wedding date approaches, she decides there’s no time like the present to meet her knight in shining armor. With the help of a spreadsheet and her loyal best friend, Yinka sets out to find what her mom and aunties want most: her future husband.

In this collection of science fiction short stories by award-winning author Samuel Delany, race, sexuality, gender, and colonization take the forefront. Through the lens of aliens, genetic mutations, and futuristic technology, Delany examines how these social constructs exist within our present, and what they could become in the future. The collection includes the title story, “Aye, and Gomorrah,” first published in 1967, about a group of astronauts known as “Spacers” who are neutered before puberty to avoid the effects of space radiation, becoming androgynous. The story earned Delany the Nebula Award, given annually by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Prolific writer Roxanne Gay explores her relationship to feminism and womanhood in this New York Times best-selling collection of essays. Through humor and insight, she admits that her favorite color is pink and that she reads Vogue unironically. She explores the state of feminism today as well as popular culture (“Surviving Django,” “The Morality of Tyler Perry”).

In this first book of Jemison’s epic science fantasy series Broken Earth, Essun, a seemingly ordinary woman, comes home to find her son brutally murdered by her husband, who has run away with their daughter. Wanting to reunite with her daughter, Essun sets out to find them, but she must traverse a civilization in chaos after the fall of an empire and an arid land plagued by deadly earthquakes. First published in 2015, The Fifth Season couldn’t be more timely, with its focus on catastrophic climate change. It won a Hugo Award for best novel of the year.

The Personal Librarian is a fictionalized account of Belle da Costa Greene, the real-life librarian of the wealthy and powerful Gilded Age industrialist J. P. Morgan. Greene was in charge of curating Morgan’s extensive collection of rare manuscripts, books, and artwork for his newly built J. Pierpont Morgan Library in Manhattan. Her proximity to Morgan made her one of the most powerful people in New York’s art and book world, but she carried a secret: she was a Black woman passing for white. In this historical fiction, Greene struggles to keep her secret tucked away as she moves across the top echelons of New York City society.

This newly assembled collection of essays by the late Zora Neale Hurston spans 35 years of work by the prolific writer. Set against the backdrop of the Harlem Renaissance, Jim Crow, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the desegregation of the military and schools, these probing essays offer valuable insight into the Black experience during a period of great change, triumph, and struggle. It’s the first comprehensive collection of criticism, articles, and essays by Hurston, who died in 1960. In these pieces, the writer argues that enslavement and Jim Crow deepened the inner lives and culture of Black citizens, rather than destroying them. The book has a forward by noted historian Henry Louis Gates.

How much does our past affect the future? In this science fiction novel by esteemed speculative fiction author Octavia Butler, a young Black woman writer finds herself suddenly transported to the South in the 1800s. Forced to work on a plantation as a slave, she is pushed and pulled between her present and the past and discovers that her connection to the plantation and its short-tempered master is closer than she initially thought.

This anthology of short stories, essays, and novel excerpts explores and celebrates the scope and diversity of science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy produced by Black writers. Stories include early Black speculative fiction, such as W.E.B. Du Bois’ sci-fi short story “The Comet,” where a Black man and a white woman find out that they are the only two people left alive after an apocalyptic event, and Charles Chestnutt’s “The Goopherd Grapevine,” a story about a grapevine that slaves believe to be haunted and refuse to go near.

In this romantic comedy, a sequel to Get a Life, Chloe Brown (don’t worry, you don’t have to have read the first book to enjoy this one), Chloe’s younger sister, Danika, takes the stage. Dani is not looking for love, deciding instead to pursue professional and academic success and the ideal no-strings-attached relationship. After praying for the perfect friend-with-benefits, the universe brings her Zafir Ansari, a grumpy security guard, ex–rugby player, and secret hopeless romantic. After a video of Zafir rescuing Dani from a workplace fire drill goes viral, he convinces her to keep up their romantic charade to help raise money for his sports charity for kids. Dani decides that supporting a good cause and snagging the perfect friends-with-benefits is a win-win situation, but as she and Zafir spend more time together, she discovers that not falling for him will be harder than she thought.