Blacks book series in reading order

by Chris Bradford

by Malcolm X

Chris Bradford is an English author and black belt martial artist, best known for the Young Samurai children's series. Puffin published the first Young Samurai book, The Way of the Warrior, in 2008, and Disney bought the rights that year. Seven further books followed, and a ninth, The Return of the Warrior, marked the series' tenth anniversary in 2018. The Bodyguard series began in 2013 with Hostage, in which teenage bodyguard Connor Reeves protects the US president's daughter. Other series include Ninja, Virtual Kombat, Bulletcatcher and Soul Hunters, and Lunar (2023) is the newest title.

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.

Julius Lester

48 books• 2 series

To Be a Slave (1968) opens the catalogue of Julius Lester, an American writer for both children and adults who was also a civil rights activist, a photographer and a musician with two recorded albums of folk music and original songs. Lester taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for 32 years, from 1971 to 2003. The 48 listed titles run to The Girl Who Saved Yesterday (2016) and return to African American history, slavery, folktales and race relations. Lester lived from 1939 to 2018.

Virginia Hamilton (March 12, 1936 to February 19, 2002) was an American children's author who wrote 41 books. M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974) won the U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature and the 1975 Newbery Medal. Hamilton's work explores the African-American experience, which Hamilton termed "Liberation Literature". Further honours were the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1992 and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award in 1995. The catalogue lists 44 entries from Zeely (1967) to Liberation Literature (2024), including The House of Dies Drear (1968), The Planet of Junior Brown (1971) and Justice and Her Brothers (1978).

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.

Theodore Taylor (June 23, 1921 - October 26, 2006) was an American writer of more than 50 fiction and non-fiction books for young adult readers. The Cay, Timothy of the Cay, The Bomb and The Weirdo are among Taylor's works, and The Weirdo won the 1992 Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery. Taylor died in Laguna Beach, California. The catalogue holds 43 books from The Magnificent Mitscher (1954) to Billy the Kid (2005), with shipwrecks, survival, North Carolina and the Second World War in the subjects and Cay, Tuck and the Cape Hatteras Trilogy as series.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

37 books• 3 series

Ngugi wa Thiong'o (5 January 1938 - 28 May 2025), born James Ngugi, was a Kenyan writer and academic described as East Africa's leading novelist and an important figure in modern African literature. Ngugi wrote in English first and turned later to Gikuyu, arguing for literature written in native African languages, and founded and edited the Gikuyu-language journal Mutiiri. The catalogue holds 37 books from Weep Not, Child (1964) to Decolonizing Language and Other Revolutionary Ideas (2025), taking in The River Between (1965), A Grain of Wheat (1967), Petals of Blood (1977) and Devil on the Cross (1980), alongside plays, short stories, memoirs, children's literature and essays.

Malcolm X is the name on 11 catalogued books published between 1964 and 2012, and the subject headings date Malcolm X to 1925-1965. The Ballot or the Bullet (1964) is the earliest title, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements date from 1965. Later titles include By Any Means Necessary (1970), Malcolm X: The Last Speeches (1989) and Malcolm X: Speeches at Harvard (1991). Subject headings cover African Americans, civil rights, Black Muslims and race relations.

Paule Marshall (1929-2019) was an American writer, best known for the 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones. Nine titles are catalogued under the name, from that debut to Triangular Road (2009). Subjects record African American women, West Indian Americans, young women, feminist fiction, domestic fiction and Caribbean women authors, with single-author short stories among the forms. Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961), The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Daughters (1991) and The Fisher King (2000) fill out the listing. Marshall was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992, at the age of 63.

David Olusoga

8 books

David Adetayo Olusoga, born January 1970, is a British-Nigerian historian, broadcaster and film-maker, and Professor of Public History at the University of Manchester. Olusoga has made historical documentaries for the BBC and written for The Guardian. The catalogue holds 8 books running from The Kaiser's Holocaust (2010) to Black History for Every Day of the Year (2024). Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016) appears alongside a short edition (2020) and an illustrated edition (2022). Subject headings name Black British history, race relations, colonies and genocide.