Read Harder
Read Harder is Book Riot’s annual reading challenge, where we design 24 tasks to help you read outside your comfort zone and find your next favorite read!
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Read Harder is Book Riot’s annual reading challenge, where we design 24 tasks to help you read outside your comfort zone and find your next favorite read!
I had to do it to you. Even though the past couple of weeks have brought best-of book list after best-of book list, I had to give you one more.
Of course, this list is just a sample of the many great books published by BIPOC authors this year, and spans across genres, fiction, and nonfiction, even including a couple poetry titles. The books on this list, assembled with the help of Editor Kelly Jensen, were on many of the biggest Best of the Year books lists, including NPR’s, Barnes & Noble’s, Bookshop.org’s, and Electric Literature’s. There are also some from our own list and a few that have won book awards this year.
For the sake of not being too repetitive, I left off books I mentioned recently in my round-up of the best BIPOC books to gift this year, though I will include them here for reference:
One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar
Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy
King of Ashes by S.A. Cosby
The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy
Among the best BIPOC books of the year are works by award-winning authors, meditations on slippery characters, historical horror, mysterious family sagas, magical nonfiction, and much more.
A beguiling, sharp, and surprising book that will have you scratching your head in the very best way. Clean, cutting observations and slippery characters combine in this gem for literary fiction lovers. Be warned: you might have to live with a little (ok more than a little) uncertainty in this book, but let Kitamura lead you toward a little provocative discombobulation. —Jeff O’Neal
Literary fiction of the highest order from a Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Not much happens in this quiet, dream-like novel that asks rich questions about history, memory, connection, and pain. It’s the rare book that can be equally subtle and unsettling, and that’s evidence of a masterful writer working at the height of her powers. You always know you’re in good hands with Kang, and that makes it a pleasure to follow her wherever she wants to go. —Rebecca Joines Schinsky
On the third day of reading Jones’ latest horror novel, I had a nightmare, but it might not be why you think. The monsters here are supernatural and all-consuming, but the true horror is the very real story that’s told of the Marias Massacre, where around 200 Blackfeet were murdered in the dead of winter. The story is told through a journal found in 2012, which was written in 1912 by a Lutheran pastor. The pastor records his time with a Blackfeet man named Good Stab, a man with peculiar eating habits and seemingly superhuman abilities… and revenge on his mind. —Erica Ezeifedi
Susan Choi’s sixth novel is a masterpiece, a family saga wrapped in a mystery that haunts its characters. Young Louisa and her father are walking along a beach at night, carrying flashlights. Hours later, Louisa is found alone, barely alive, and her father is never seen again. As Louisa grows up with her mother, the loss of her father hovering over their lives, parts of their pasts are revealed, including a long-held secret. Flashlight is a sharp examination of not only the physical loss of someone, but loss of place, estrangement, and loss of self, as Louisa and her mother carry around a grief with no end. It’s a stunning heart-puncher. —Liberty Hardy
All access members continue below for more of the best BIPOC books of 2025.
This brilliant literary romance is a powerful reminder that Black country artists have always been here. One-hit-wonder Luke is honored to open for his idol, 90’s superstar JoJo Lane, at her induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. But he’ll have to confront his complicated past, because the concert is being held in his and JoJo’s small hometown in Arkansas. Luke was close to JoJo’s daughter, August, until a shocking betrayal ripped them apart and jump-started his career. As Luke, August, and JoJo grapple with their complicated relationships to the music industry, a new love song takes shape. It’s fantastic in any format, but I recommend the full-cast audiobook. —Susie Dumond
Lalami is another multi-award nominated author and her latest reminds me of Minority Report as it questions how technology, privacy, and freedom can coexist. We follow Sara, who has just landed at LAX, and who is swiftly gathered up by agents who say that she will soon commit a crime against her husband. They came to this conclusion using data from her dreams and the Risk Assessment Administration’s algorithm. She’s taken to a facility and held there with other dreamers, all of whom are women, and all of whom claim innocence of crimes not yet committed. Months pass before a new resident arrives who shakes things up. Now Sara is on a path to knuck if you buck against those who have taken her freedom. —Erica Ezeifedi
This is the debut solo novella from Amal El-Mohtar, co-author of the hugely popular novella This Is How You Lose the Time War! It’s about the two Hawthorn sisters, who live on the edge of Faerie, and what happens when one of them puts their lives at risk by falling for a Faerie man. Holly Black calls it “Half delicious murder ballad, half beguiling love story.” YES, PLEASE. — Liberty Hardy
Fantasy! Romance! Historical Fiction! Found family! Gorgeous art! Venessa Vida Kelley’s dreamy debut When the Tides Held the Moon has something for everyone. Puerto Rican blacksmith Benny is tasked with building a giant glass tank. When he delivers it to the 1910s Coney Island carnival sideshow that commissioned it, he realizes it was constructed for a real merman captured from the East River. And when he falls in love with that merman, Benny realizes he’s constructed his prison and now must find a way to help him escape. The ensemble cast of “human curiosities” and Vida Kelley’s vivid illustrations make this story truly shine. —Susie Dumond
This was the 2025 National Book Award winner for Fiction, and, it’s about a man, who, at his center, just really just wants some peace and quiet. Sixty-three-year-old Raja lives with his octogenerian mother in a small Beirut apartment, where they are known as “the neighborhood homosexual” and a beloved high school philiosophy teacher, respectively. Well, Raja’s mother stays in his business, so when he’s offered an all-expenses-paid writing residency in the US, he jumps at the opportunity. What at first feels like a perfectly timed getaway soon starts to feel like something else, as Raja soon starts reliving past traumas he was trying to suppress. But Alameddine doesn’t only fill Raja’s story with doom and gloom—over six decades, we see a unique life unfold that’s full of absurdities, self-discovery, and humor. —Erica Ezeifedi
Li starts her memoir with “There is no good way to say this,” then details how she lost both of her children to suicide years apart. She explores her grief and how she has learned to be and to do—everything from gardening to playing the piano—with the constant presence of grief and thoughts of death.
“The verb that does not die is to be. Vincent was and is and will always be Vincent. James was and is and will always be James. We were and are and will always be their parents. There is no now and then, now and later, only, now and now and now and now.” —Erica Ezeifedi
This is a deeply researched, definitive biography of transgender activist and artist Marsha P. Johnson. Written by the brilliant multi-hyphenate Tourmaline, this beautifully written book shows Marsha as a whole person, both before and after the Stonewall Uprising of 1969. Many people have heard that Marsha threw the first brick during the Stonewall Uprising, but few people know much beyond that. She was an artist and performer who toured outside of the U.S. She was a poet and muse and a fierce friend bursting with love. This book also includes some gorgeous photographs and is told with the care and reverence that Marsha’s story deserves. —Patricia Elzie-Tuttle
Vauhini Vara, an award-winning tech journalist and editor, delves into the world of Chat GPT. What will the world look like now that this powerful AI has been unleashed? Vara answers this question and more in her new essay collection. —Kendra Winchester
Since the beginning of the United States, Black conjure women, who combine traditional West African spiritual beliefs with herbal remedies and local resources, have been a balm to their communities. The legacy of these Mammies, Voodoo Queens, and Reconstruction-era Blues Women began, like so much of American history, in the South during slavery. Here, Feminist philosopher Lindsey Stewart traces their influence and legacy, which includes everything from blue jeans to Vicks VapoRub, to 2023’s The Little Mermaid. —Erica Ezeifedi
I named this a Best Book of 2025 So Far and had to bring it back for the finale, a collection of beautiful stories of self-discovery, activism, resistance, and survival from queer elders of color. These testimonies are a necessary record of lived experience and hard-won progress, a love letter to queer history, and a reminder of the gift it is to have living elders among us. The joy in each of these stories is what has stayed with me, a joy that persisted even in periods of profound struggle and loss. We hear all the time that joy is resistance; this is the kind of work that really drives that point home and gives me hope for a better future. —Vanessa Diaz
Pulling from Limón’s six published collections, these gorgeous poems unfold in chronological order from Lucky Wreck to The Hurting Kind. Having read every in-print title by the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate, I found myself electric with excitement to behold some of the prolific author’s new and new-to-me work. Revisiting familiar poems fed my bookish heart in myriad ways, and reading pieces from This Big Fake World and the final section for the first time is precisely why I open books—to connect, to learn, to feel awe. If you need a gift for yourself and for others, look into this exploration of dreams, grief, love, the ordinary, and the extraordinary. —Connie Pan
What the National Book Foundation had to say about The Intentions of Thunder:
“The Intentions of Thunder gathers, for the first time, the essential work from across Patricia Smith’s career. Here, Smith’s poems, affixed with her remarkable gift of insight, present a rapturous ode to life. With careful yet vaulting movement, these poems traverse the redeeming landscape of pain, confront the frightening revelations of history, and disclose the joyous possibilities of the future. The result is a profound testament to the necessity of poetry—all the careful witness, embodied experience, and bristling pleasure that it bestows—and of Smith’s necessary voice. Lyrical and sly, meditative and volcanic, The Intentions of Thunder stunningly explores the fullness of living.”
For more of the best books of the year, make sure to check out our mega list. It could also be fun to compare to this list of the best BIPOC books of the year (so far) that was created in July.
