Feb. 16, 2026 – February marks Black History Month, and we've collected a list of recently published novels that dive into that history. Some follow families across generations, some focus on one point in time, but all illuminate essential parts of the American story. Read these books this month and all year.
"Happy Land" by Dolen Perkins-Valdez (2025)
Inspired by distant memories of African kingdoms, a community of formerly enslaved men and women grasped freedom and started lives on mountain land that they owned. They worked hard, lived well, and loved there. For a time the kingdom thrived ... and then it disappeared.
Present Day. Nikki hasn't seen her grandmother in years, due to a mysterious estrangement inherited from her mother. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates only for a moment. After years of silence in her family, she's determined to get answers while she still can. But instead of answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki a shocking story about her great-great-great-grandmother Queen Luella and the very land they are standing on. Land that Mother Rita says must be protected. The more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land and the lives of those who dwelled in the ruins she finds in the woods – who are buried beneath stone grave markers – the more she understands that sometimes, atonement for the previous generations' mistakes falls squarely on the shoulders of the descendants. And it's up to her to make things right.
"Harlem Rhapsody" by Victoria Christopher Murray (2025)
In 1919, as civil and social unrest grips the country, there is a little corner of America, a place called Harlem where something special is stirring. Here, the New Negro is rising and Black pride is evident everywhere ... in music, theatre, fashion and the arts. And there on stage in the center of this renaissance is Jessie Redmon Fauset, the new literary editor of the preeminent Negro magazine The Crisis. W.E.B. Du Bois, the founder and editor of The Crisis, has charged her with discovering young writers whose words will change the world. Jessie attacks the challenge with fervor, quickly finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends. Under Jessie's leadership, The Crisis thrives, the writers become notable and magazine subscriptions soar. Every Negro writer in the country wants their work published in the magazine now known for its groundbreaking poetry and short stories.
Jessie's rising star is shining bright ... but her relationship with W.E.B. could jeopardize all that she's built. The man, considered by most to be the leader of Black America, is not only Jessie's boss, he's her lover. And neither his wife nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Their torrid and tumultuous affair is complicated by a secret desire that Jessie harbors – to someday, herself, become the editor of the magazine, a position that only W.E.B. Du Bois has held. In the face of overwhelming sexism and racism, Jessie must balance her drive with her desires. However, as she strives to preserve her legacy, she'll discover the high cost of her unparalleled success.
"People of Means" by Nancy Johnson (2025)
In the fall of 1959, Freda Gilroy arrives on the campus of Fisk University full of hope, carrying a suitcase and the voice of her father telling her she’s part of a family legacy of Black excellence. Soon, the ugliness of the Jim Crow South intrudes, and Freda, reluctant to get involved, is torn between a soon-to-be doctor and an audacious young activist. Freda must decide how much she’s willing to risk in the name of justice.
In 1992 Chicago, Freda’s daughter, Tulip, is an ambitious PR professional on track for an exciting career, if workplace politics and racial microaggressions don’t get in her way. But with the ruling in the Rodney King trial weighing heavily on her, Tulip feels called to action and must choose, just like her mother had three decades prior, what her role will be in the story of America’s quest for equality.
"Let us March On" by Shara Moon (2025)
A stirring novel inspired by the life of an unsung heroine, and real-life crusader, Lizzie McDuffie, who as a maid in FDR’s White House spearheaded the Civil Rights movement of her time.
When Lizzie McDuffie, maid to Eleanor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, boldly proclaimed herself FDR’s “Secretary-On-Colored-People’s-Affairs,” she became more than just a maid – she became the President’s eyes and ears into the Black community. After joining the White House to work alongside her husband, FDR’s personal valet, Lizzie managed to become completely indispensable to the Roosevelt family. Never shy about pointing out injustices, she advocated for the needs and rights of her fellow African Americans when those in the White House blocked access to the President.
"Symphony of Secrets" by Brendan Slocumb (2023)
Bern Hendricks has just received the call of a lifetime. As one of the world's preeminent experts on the famed twentieth-century composer Frederick Delaney, Bern knows everything there is to know about the man behind the music. When Mallory Roberts, a board member of the distinguished Delaney Foundation and direct descendant of the man himself, asks for Bern's help authenticating a newly discovered piece, which may be his famous lost opera, RED, he jumps at the chance. With the help of his tech-savvy acquaintance Eboni, Bern soon discovers that the truth is far more complicated than history would have them believe.
In 1920s Manhattan, Josephine Reed is living on the streets and frequenting jazz clubs when she meets the struggling musician Fred Delaney. But where young Delaney struggles, Josephine soars. She's a natural prodigy who hears beautiful music in the sounds of the world around her. With Josephine as his silent partner, Delaney's career takes off – but who is the real genius here? In the present day, Bern and Eboni begin to uncover more clues that indicate Delaney may have had help in composing his most successful work. Armed with more questions than answers and caught in the crosshairs of a powerful organization who will stop at nothing to keep their secret hidden, Bern and Eboni will move heaven and earth in their dogged quest to right history's wrongs.
"Time's Undoing" by Cheryl A. Head (2023)
Birmingham, 1929: Robert Lee Harrington, a master carpenter, has just moved to Alabama to pursue a job opportunity, bringing along his pregnant wife and young daughter. Birmingham is in its heyday, known as the "Magic City" for its booming steel industry, and while Robert and his family find much to enjoy in the city's busy markets and vibrant nightlife, it's also a stronghold for the Klan. And with his beautiful, light-skinned wife and snazzy car, Robert begins to worry that he might be drawing the wrong kind of attention.
2019: Meghan McKenzie, the youngest reporter at the Detroit Free Press, has grown up hearing family lore about her great-grandfather's murder – but no one knows the full story of what really happened back then, and his body was never found. Determined to find answers to her family's long-buried tragedy and spurred by the urgency of the Black Lives Matter movement, Meghan travels to Birmingham. But as her investigation begins to uncover dark secrets that spider across both the city and time, her life may be in danger. Inspired by true events, Time's Undoing is both a passionate tale of one woman's quest for the truth behind the racially motivated trauma that has haunted her family for generations and, as newfound friends and supporters in Birmingham rally around Meghan's search, the uplifting story of a community coming together to fight for change.
"In the Upper Country" by Kai Thomas (2023)
In the 1800s in Dunmore, a Canadian town settled by people fleeing enslavement in the American south, young Lensinda Martin works for a crusading Black journalist. One night, a neighboring farmer summons Lensinda after a slave hunter is shot dead on his land by an old woman who recently arrived via the Underground Railroad. When the old woman refuses to flee before the authorities arrive, the farmer urges Lensinda to gather testimony from her before she can be condemned for the crime. But the old woman doesn't want to confess. Instead she proposes a barter: a story for a story. And so begins an extraordinary exchange of tales that reveal an interwoven history of Black and Indigenous peoples in a wide swath of what is called North America.
As time runs out, Lensinda is challenged to uncover her past and face her fears in order to make good on the bargain of a story for a story. And it seems the old woman may carry a secret that could shape Lensinda's destiny. Traveling along the path of the Underground Railroad from Virginia to Michigan, from the Indigenous nations around the Great Lakes, to the Black refugee communities of Canada, "In the Upper Country" weaves together unlikely stories of love, survival, and familial upheaval that map the interconnected history of the peoples of North America in an entirely new and resonant way.
"River Sing Me Home" by Eleanor Shearer (2023)
The master of the Providence plantation in Barbados gathers his slaves and announces the king has decreed an end to slavery. As of the following day, the Emancipation Act of 1834 will come into effect. The cries of joy fall silent when he announces that they are no longer his slaves; they are now his apprentices. No one can leave. They must work for him for another six years. Freedom is just another name for the life they have always lived. So Rachel runs.
Away from Providence, she begins a desperate search to find her children – the five who survived birth and were sold. Are any of them still alive? Rachel has to know. The grueling, dangerous journey takes her from Barbados then, by river, deep into the forest of British Guiana and finally across the sea to Trinidad. She is driven on by the certainty that a mother cannot be truly free without knowing what has become of her children, even if the answer is more than she can bear. These are the stories of Mary Grace, Micah, Thomas Augustus, Cherry Jane and Mercy. But above all this is the story of Rachel and the extraordinary lengths to which a mother will go to find her children ... and her freedom.
"House of Eve" by Sadeqa Johnson (2023)
1950s Philadelphia: Fifteen-year-old Ruby Pearsall is on track to becoming the first in her family to attend college, in spite of having a mother more interested in keeping a man than raising a daughter. But a taboo love affair threatens to pull her back down into the poverty and desperation that has been passed on to her like a birthright.
Eleanor Quarles arrives in Washington, DC, with ambition and secrets. When she meets the handsome William Pride at Howard University, they fall madly in love. But William hails from one of DC's elite wealthy Black families, and his parents don't let just anyone into their fold. Eleanor hopes that a baby will make her finally feel at home in William's family and grant her the life she's been searching for. With their stories colliding in the most unexpected of ways, Ruby and Eleanor will both make decisions that shape the trajectory of their lives.
"Good Dirt" by Charmaine Wilkerson (2025)
When ten-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well. The crime was never solved – and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England – the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby's high profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that's exactly what they get.
So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there. And as she tries to process what's happened, she begins to think about the other loss her family suffered on that day eighteen years ago – the stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations, brought North by an enslaved ancestor. But little does she know that the handcrafted piece of pottery held more than just her family's history – it might also hold the key to unlocking her own future.