Add These Sisterly Stories to Your TBR List

Eight new books by Black women explore the bonds that sustain us—through friendship, chosen family, legacy, and love.

By

Sibongile Lynch

 
Published February 06, 2026
AARP

Black women have always created, nurtured, and sustained powerful communities of care. From family circles and church pews to group chats and neighborhood stoops, our stories are rich with resilience, creativity, shared struggle, and shared joy. Each year, new books by Black women continue to expand the tapestry of what Black womanhood and sisterhood look like.

If you’re looking for your next great read, these new releases deserve a spot on your list. From sweeping fiction to lyrical nonfiction, these stories explore connection, legacy, healing, and the bonds that sustain us. Here are eight books that speak beautifully to the many layers of Black sisterhood:

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Fire, Sword, and Sea

by Vanessa Riley

(Available now)

Vanessa Riley, known for lush historical fiction centering the lives of Black women across the diaspora, returns with Fire, Sword, and Sea. This story blends her signature historical detail with themes of womanhood, bravery, and chosen kinship. Set in 1675, the protagonist, Jacquotte Delahaye, poses as a man to become a dockworker, seafarer, and pirate. She forms a deep bond with Bahati, an African-born woman who has escaped slavery and also disguises herself as a man.

When her fellow pirates decide to enter the slave trade, Jacquotte turns away from the pursuit of riches and begins to plot a war of liberation. You’ll be on the edge of your seat as her bold plan unfolds, and Jacquotte risks her life again and again for freedom. Riley’s work consistently uplifts the unseen women of history and highlights how sisterhood can be both a lifeline and a catalyst for transformation. Expect courageous women stepping into their power, bonds forged through adversity, and the reminder that our foremothers were forces, not footnotes.

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With Love from Harlem

by ReShonda Tate

(Available now)

ReShonda Tate’s upcoming novel promises a heartfelt journey through one of Black America’s most iconic cultural communities. Set against the vibrancy of Harlem, a place built on the brilliance, artistry, and ambition of Black people, this story follows 23-year-old Hazel Scott, a jazz prodigy, film star, and fierce advocate for civil rights. She’s living life on her own terms when Adam Clayton Powell Jr. enters the picture. The problem? He’s married.

As Hazel’s star rises, Adam takes the national stage in Congress, and each navigates the affair, juggling it with their own professional ambitions. Hazel is forced to choose between love and her own personhood in this exhilarating tale of ego, ambition, and sacrifice. Tate is known for warmth, humor, and emotional storytelling, and With Love from Harlem offers all three in spades.

On Sundays, She Picked Flowers

by Yah Yah Scholfield

 (Available now)

In this surreal Southern Gothic debut, Judith “Jude” Rice escapes her abusive mother with no plan except survival. She eventually finds refuge in an eerie, history-soaked house in the forests of southern Georgia. Over 13 years, she transforms from a damaged runaway into a healer who tends to the land’s ghosts and her own wounds. But her fragile peace shatters when a mysterious, magnetic woman appears at her door. Drawn to the stranger, yet unsettled by her presence, Jude feels old violence rising within her.

Williams is known for emotionally resonant stories about Black womanhood, and On Sundays She Picked Flowers offers a deeply reflective exploration of grief, memory, and the women who help us grow through life’s most challenging moments. Readers who appreciate narratives about healing, chosen family, and quiet acts of love will find much to connect with here.

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The Flower Bearers

by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

(Available now)

In this intimate and poetic memoir, Griffiths grieves the loss of her dear friend and chosen sister, Kamilah Aisha Moon. This poignant work reflects on the life-changing significance of their 17-year bond, delving into loss and longing, while also protecting and holding space for healing.

The Flower Bearers is a profoundly tender tribute to friendship and sisterhood among Black women. Griffiths’ voice is raw and luminous, giving language to the sacredness of sisterly love. For any Black woman who has ever been held up by another Black woman, or has been that support for someone else, this memoir will resonate deeply.

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Keeper of Lost Children

by Sadeqa Johnson

(Available now)

In 1950s occupied Germany, Ethel Gathers, the wife of a Black American officer, discovers an orphanage of mixed-race children abandoned by society, and becomes determined to find them homes. Around the same time, young soldier Ozzie Phillips begins a life-altering relationship with a German woman, Jelka. Years later, in 1965 Maryland, Sophia Clark escapes her cold parents for a prestigious boarding school, only to uncover a secret that sends her on a search for her true identity.

Moving between these three lives, Keeper of Lost Children reveals how one woman’s vision reshapes countless futures. It also explores how love, whether romantic, familial, or self-affirming, can transcend boundaries.

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Kin

by Tayari Jones

(Available now)

Vernice and Annie are best friends growing up in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, and they have one major thing in common: Neither of them has a mother. What does parental abandonment look like for a young Black girl growing up in the South? Each girl’s journey answers that question in very different ways, with one path leading to Spelman and stability and the other leading to love and adventure, while both seek to fill a void.

Jones’ characters tend to be compelling in their longings, shortcomings, and interiorities, and the two girls (turned women) at the center of this novel will warm your heart from the beginning. Injustice is an oft-explored theme in Jones’ work, and here, the injustice of absence is laid bare. Read this if you love stories about mothers, daughters, sisterhood, and friendship.

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Big Girl Blitz

by Desiree S. Evans

(April 14; available for preorder)

Bold, lively, and brimming with personality, Big Girl Blitz offers a fresh, unapologetic perspective on contemporary Black womanhood. Jazmyn Payne fled her hometown (and the fatphobes who made her life hell) the minute she graduated high school. Growing up, Jazmyn’s haven and confidante is her Aunt Addison. When her aunt’s health takes a drastic turn, she implores Jazmyn to spice up her life. Dating is the last thing on Jasmyn’s mind…until Lamar Anderson sits next to her at the local sports bar.

Evans centers women who take up space, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. From navigating relationships to pursuing dreams, these characters remind us that joy is a form of resistance, and that the special relationship with the women in our families can be both a soft place to land and a hype squad when we need one.

Elemental Blackness: Black Liberation and the Natural World

by Cherise Morris

(expected later this year)

In her ritual-performance work, The Cosmic Matter of Black Lives, Morris blended essay, poetry, and spiritual reflection, creating a contemplative, genre-defying exploration of Black embodiment and collective memory. Morris’s work honors the interconnectedness of Black people, including how Black women have historically nurtured, protected, and preserved the soul of our communities.

Morris’ upcoming debut book, Elemental Blackness: Black Liberation and the Natural World, invites readers to consider the threads that bind us. Centering on the four elements of water, fire, earth and air, Elemental Blackness shows us how Blackness, the environment and even Morris herself have been shaped and shifted by structures of white supremacy. From the trauma of the Middle Passage, to the grief of George Floyd, and from slave uprisings to the Flint water crisis, Morris’ eclectic and electrifying prose takes us on a whirlwind tour of what it means to be Black in America, alongside intimate recollections of her own life, from coming of age as a young girl in the country, to finding a new home in Detroit.

All of these books remind us that sisterhood is not just a relationship, but a practice, a history, and a living tradition. Whether grounded in fiction, memoir, or spiritual contemplation, each work celebrates the ways Black women show up for ourselves and one another, generation after generation.

Sibongile B.N. Lynch, whose name is a Zulu word meaning "thankful" or “we are thankful for her,” is a longtime Atlanta-based writer who has recently relocated to Panama. Her work explores aging as a Black woman in the 21st century, and retirement for women as ascension rather than retreat.