3 books by Black authors to read on your summer vacation

Eric L Martin | Chubby Diaries

2020 for sure has been a tumultuous year. With cities finally opening up, families are taking alternative methods of travel to stay safe with social distancing guidelines still in place. Many families are taking to the roadways to escape being quarantined in their homes.

But while you are escaping your home to see the outdoors, here are 3 highly recommended books from Black authors that will help you escape and enjoy your summer vacation.

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

An unexpected teenage pregnancy pulls together two families from different social classes, and exposes the private hopes, disappointments, and longings that can bind or divide us from each other, from the New York Times-bestselling and National Book Award-winning author of Another Brooklyn and Brown Girl Dreaming.” (Amazon)

Imagine via Amazon.com

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

“Fearless…[A] major literary debut…Unnervingly unpredictable…Friday Black ought to land as publishing’s definitive addition to an acting pop culture trend: new black surrealism. Films such as Get Out and Sorry to Bother You, or Donald Glover projects like Atlanta and “This is America,” derive political power from a kind of absurdist framing, which this book shares…Adjei-Brenyah executes his premises with an elegant Black Mirror-like realism…In their gnarly intensity, their polemical potent, they hit where we live, here and now. Sometimes it takes a wild mind to speak the plainest truth.” (Entertainment Weekly)

Image via Amazon.com

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

“It’s Lagos noir—pulpy, peppery and sinister, served up in a comic deadpan…This book is, above all, built to move, to hurtle forward—and it does so, dizzyingly. There’s a seditious pleasure in its momentum. At a time when there are such wholesome and dull claims on fiction—on its duty to ennoble or train us in empathy—there’s a relief in encountering a novel faithful to art’s first imperative: to catch and keep our attention… This scorpion-tailed little thriller leaves a response, and a sting, you will remember.” (NEW YORK TIMES)