Blacks book series in reading order

Reginald Hill wrote English police procedurals, and Dalziel and Pascoe is the partnership he is known for, introduced in A Clubbable Woman (1970). Joe Sixsmith, a private investigator, heads a second series, and Hill also published as Patrick Ruell and Dick Morland, with titles including The Castle of the Demon and Matlock's System. Sixty titles make up the catalogue, which ends with the collection A Candle for Christmas & Other Stories.

Elizabeth George

36 books• 6 series

British police procedurals are Elizabeth George's main line of work, centred on Inspector Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers investigating murders across Great Britain. The catalogue holds 36 books from A Great Deliverance (1988) to A Slowly Dying Cause in 2025. George also wrote the Saratoga Woods and Abandonment of Hannah Armstrong titles, short stories and non-fiction. At a median of 576 pages these are long novels, and the series remains ongoing.

Alexander McCall Smith

165 books• 25 series

Sir Alexander McCall Smith, born 24 August 1948, is a Scottish legal scholar and novelist who created The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. Born and raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), McCall Smith was Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh and worked on medical law and bioethics committees. English-language sales passed 40 million by 2010, with translations into 46 languages. The catalogue lists 165 books from White Hippo (1980) to 2026, including 44 Scotland Street, Isabel Dalhousie, Detective Varg and children's titles.

Philip Pullman

51 books• 10 series

Philip Pullman's catalogue covers fantasy and children's adventure, with detective stories, fairy tales and graphic novels alongside. His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust are the sequences it is built around, joined by the Sally Lockhart mysteries, the New Cut Gang, the Canongate Myths and The Adventures of John Blake. Sixty-five catalogued titles run from The Haunted Storm (1972) through The Ruby in the Smoke (1985) to The Rose Field in 2025.

Nnedi Okorafor

40 books• 11 series

Nnedi Okorafor, born Nnedimma Nkemdili Okorafor on April 8, 1974, is a Nigerian American writer of science fiction and fantasy for children and adults. The Binti series and the novels Who Fears Death, Zahrah the Windseeker, Akata Witch, Akata Warrior, Lagoon and Remote Control lead Okorafor's body of work, which also takes in comics and film. Okorafor coined the terms Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism for this writing and has won the Hugo, Nebula, Eisner and World Fantasy awards. The catalogue lists 40 books from Zahrah the Windseeker (2005) to The Daughter Who Remains (2026).

Mildred DeLois Taylor, born September 13, 1943, is an American young adult novelist whose Logan family books portray family life and the racism African Americans faced in the Deep South. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry won the 1977 Newbery Medal. Taylor received the first NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in 2003, the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2020 and the Children's Literature Legacy Award in 2021. The 11 catalogued books include Let the Circle Be Unbroken (1981), The Road to Memphis (1992) and All the Days Past, All the Days to Come (2020).

Alice Walker

50 books• 1 series

Alice Walker is an American novelist, poet, short story writer and social activist. Walker's 50 catalogued books run from The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) to Sweet People Are Everywhere (2021). The Color Purple (1982) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Walker the first African-American woman to take that award, and it heads a Color Purple sequence. Poetry such as Revolutionary Petunias (1973) and essays such as In Search of Our Mother's Garden (1983) sit beside the novels. African American women authors, biography and poetry recur as subject headings. No new title has appeared since 2021.

Richard Wright

17 books• 1 series

Richard Wright (September 4, 1908 to November 28, 1960) was an American writer of novels, short stories, poems and non-fiction. Race runs through the work, particularly the discrimination and violence faced by African Americans from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. Uncle Tom's Children (1938), a collection of novellas, Native Son (1940) and the memoir Black Boy (1945) are Wright's best-known books. Literary critics credit the work with helping to change American race relations in the mid-20th century. The catalogue lists 17 titles, including 12 Million Black Voices (1941), The Outsider (1953), Eight Men (1958), The Long Dream (1958) and The Man Who Lived Underground (2021).

Chinua Achebe

30 books• 1 series

Chinua Achebe (16 November 1930 - 21 March 2013), born Albert Chinualumogu Achebe, was a Nigerian novelist, poet and critic and a central figure of modern African literature. Things Fall Apart (1958) is Achebe's first novel and the most widely studied, translated and read African novel; together with No Longer at Ease (1960) and Arrow of God (1964) it completes the African Trilogy. A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987) followed among the later novels. Readers commonly call Achebe the father of modern African literature, a description Achebe rejected. The catalogue holds 30 books, closing with There Was a Country (2012).

Nancy Farmer writes science fiction and fantasy for children and young adults. Thirteen books are catalogued between Do You Know Me (1993) and A New Year's Tale (2013). The House of the Scorpion (2002) won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, and three Farmer books have been named Newbery Honor books. The Sea of Trolls (2004) and The Land of the Silver Apples (2007) belong to the series named for the first of them, with druids, bards and Saxons among the subject headings. Cloning, Zimbabweans and family life sit elsewhere in the list, which also holds The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm (1994) and A Girl Named Disaster (1996). Farmer was born in 1941.