Past Kindle Book Deals but Still Must Read Books!
Looking for must read books you missed the first time around? You’re in the right place. This is where all of our past Kindle book deals live—the ones good enough to click, even if the discount’s gone. Every book here was hand-picked by our team, featured in a daily deal, and still earns a spot on your TBR.
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These Books Earned Our Seal of Approval—Snag Them Before They Vanish (Again)
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46 past books matching People of Color
A sharp fit for readers drawn to dystopian literary fiction with social commentary, violent spectacle, resistance, and moral complexity.
Chain Gang All Stars
Dystopian · Sci-Fi · People of Color · Speculative Fiction
Our take
National Book Award finalist Chain-Gang All-Stars follows Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker, imprisoned women and partners who compete in televised death matches for the possibility of freedom. Their story examines the prison system, systemic racism, capitalism, and the transformation of human suffering into entertainment. A sharp fit for readers drawn to dystopian literary fiction with social commentary, violent spectacle, resistance, and moral complexity.
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A NEW YORK TIMES TOP TEN BOOK OF THE YEAR • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own in this explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black • LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE
“This book is so good. Brutal subject matter, beautiful writing. This one is from the heart.” —Stephen King
A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Elle, Esquire, Chicago Tribune, Lit Hub, Kirkus Reviews
“Like Orwell’s 1984 and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Adjei-Brenyah’s book presents a dystopian vision so…illuminating that it should permanently shift our understanding of who we are and what we’re capable of doing.” —The Washington Post
She felt their eyes, all those executioners…
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of the Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly popular, highly controversial profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators, and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death matches before packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, Thurwar considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games. But CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo, and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar’s path have devastating consequences.
Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors, to the CAPE employees and beyond, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic, excoriating look at the American prison system’s unholy alliance of systemic racism, unchecked capitalism, and mass incarceration, and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means from a “new and necessary American voice” (Tommy Orange, The New York Times Book Review).
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A prophetic dystopian classic from Hugo Award winner Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower blends survival, faith, and visionary worldbuilding.
Parable of the Sower
Dystopian · Literary Fiction · Sci-Fi · People of Color · Speculative Fiction
Our take
A prophetic dystopian classic from Hugo Award winner Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower blends survival, faith, and visionary worldbuilding. With a 4.6-star Amazon rating and #BookTok acclaim, this unforgettable tale follows a teen girl forging a new path in a collapsing world. Butler’s words burn bright—and feel eerily relevant.
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The world is falling apart. She’s trying to build something new.
In 2020s California, fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina lives inside the walls of a gated community—safe from the fires, famine, and violence consuming the outside world. But safety is an illusion, and Lauren knows it won’t last.
Born with hyperempathy, Lauren feels others’ pain as her own. In a collapsing society where weakness is fatal, it’s a dangerous gift. But when tragedy rips away her home, she’s forced into the wilderness with nothing but her wits, a backpack, and a dream for something better.
Her vision becomes Earthseed—a radical new belief in shaping the future through change.
Octavia E. Butler’s masterpiece is more than a dystopia. It’s a prophecy. And it’s never felt more urgent.
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In Kindred, Octavia E. Butler’s time-travel masterpiece, a Black woman is pulled from 1976 to a slave plantation in 1800s Maryland—forced to ensure the birth of her family…
Kindred
Historical Fiction · Sci-Fi · People of Color
Our take
In Kindred, Octavia E. Butler’s time-travel masterpiece, a Black woman is pulled from 1976 to a slave plantation in 1800s Maryland—forced to ensure the birth of her family line by protecting the white man who assaults her ancestor. Hailed as visionary and precise, this groundbreaking classic confronts slavery’s legacy with unflinching power. 4.7 stars on Amazon.
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Experience the time travel science fiction classic from the New York Times bestselling author of Parable of the Sower and winner of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Nebula, and Hugo Awards.
A modern Black woman is pulled through time to face the horrors of slavery in this “Great American Novel” about racism, sexism, and white supremacy—then and now (The Atlantic).
“I lost an arm on my last trip home. My left arm.”
Dana’s torment begins when she suddenly vanishes on her 26th birthday from California, 1976, and is dragged through time to antebellum Maryland to rescue a boy named Rufus, heir to a slaveowner’s plantation. She soon realizes the purpose of her summons to the past: protect Rufus to ensure his assault of her Black ancestor so that she may one day be born. As she endures the traumas of slavery and the soul-crushing normalization of savagery, Dana fights to keep her autonomy and return to the present.
Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, Kindred is controlled and precise” (New York Times).
“Reading Octavia Butler taught me to dream big, and I think it’s absolutely necessary that everybody have that freedom and that willingness to dream.”
—N. K. Jemisin
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A lost heirloom.
Good Dirt
Literary Fiction · Historical Fiction · People of Color
Our take
A lost heirloom. A hidden truth. Good Dirt (4.4 stars on Amazon) is a sweeping family saga from Black Cake author Charmaine Wilkerson. When Ebby Freeman flees a public scandal, she is forced to confront the mystery of her brother’s death—and the artifact that may hold the key to her family’s past. Deeply moving and unforgettable.
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The daughter of an affluent Black family pieces together the connection between a childhood tragedy and a beloved heirloom in this moving novel from the bestselling author of Black Cake, a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick
“Engrossing . . . Wilkerson masterfully weaves these threads of love, loss and legacy [into] a thoroughly researched and beautifully imagined family saga.”—The New York Times
LONGLISTED FOR THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, Marie Claire, People, Chicago Public Library, Christian Science Monitor, Denver Public Library
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.
In this sweeping, evocative novel, Charmaine Wilkerson brings to life a multi-generational epic that examines how the past informs our present.
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Beloved turns haunting into memory made flesh, following a woman whose escape from slavery cannot free her from what survival demanded.
Beloved
Literary Fiction · People of Color
Our take
Beloved turns haunting into memory made flesh, following a woman whose escape from slavery cannot free her from what survival demanded. Sethe lives in Ohio with the trauma of Sweet Home still pressing against her present, until the ghost tied to her dead child transforms grief into something impossible to ignore. This is literary fiction shaped by horror, history, motherhood, and the brutal cost of being unowned.
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PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This "powerful, mesmerizing story” (People) is an unflinching look into the abyss of slavery, from the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner. With an afterword by the author and a new introduction by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers.
“A masterwork.... Wonderful.... I can’t imagine American literature without it.” —John Leonard, Los Angeles Times
Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
“Dazzling. . . . Magical. . . . An extraordinary work.” —The New York Times
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Beauty becomes a source of devastation in The Bluest Eye, a literary novel that examines longing, shame, and the violence of impossible ideals.
The Bluest Eye
Literary Fiction · Contemporary Fiction · People of Color
Our take
Beauty becomes a source of devastation in The Bluest Eye, a literary novel that examines longing, shame, and the violence of impossible ideals. As Pecola Breedlove yearns for blue eyes and the acceptance she believes they would bring, her story reveals the emotional and cultural forces destroying her sense of self. This is a heartbreaking, incisive read shaped by pain, vulnerability, and loss.
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A PARADE BEST BOOK OF ALL TIME • From the acclaimed Nobel Prize winner—a powerful examination of our obsession with beauty and conformity that asks questions about race, class, and gender with characteristic subtlety and grace. • With a new introduction by Jacqueline Woodson.
“So precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain and wonder that the novel becomes poetry”—The New York Times
In Morrison’s acclaimed first novel, Pecola Breedlove—an 11-year-old Black girl in an America whose love for its blond, blue-eyed children can devastate all others—prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. This is the story of the nightmare at the heart of her yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment.
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Prophecy draws closer with every mile as a ship carries a scarred young man toward a city preparing for a solar eclipse.
Black Sun
Fantasy · Historical Fantasy · Indigenous Fiction · People of Color
Our take
Prophecy draws closer with every mile as a ship carries a scarred young man toward a city preparing for a solar eclipse. In Black Sun, converging destinies unsettle a world already strained by power, history, and belief. This epic fantasy blends celestial omens, political intrigue, and forbidden magic into a tense, immersive story with a steadily mounting sense of consequence.
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Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Series!
From the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Resistance Reborn comes the “engrossing and vibrant” (Tochi Onyebuchi, author of Riot Baby) first book in the Between Earth and Sky trilogy inspired by the civilizations of the Pre-Columbian Americas and woven into a tale of celestial prophecies, political intrigue, and forbidden magic.
A god will return
When the earth and sky converge
Under the black sun
In the holy city of Tova, the winter solstice is usually a time for celebration and renewal, but this year it coincides with a solar eclipse, a rare celestial even proscribed by the Sun Priest as an unbalancing of the world.
Meanwhile, a ship launches from a distant city bound for Tova and set to arrive on the solstice. The captain of the ship, Xiala, is a disgraced Teek whose song can calm the waters around her as easily as it can warp a man’s mind. Her ship carries one passenger. Described as harmless, the passenger, Serapio is a young man, blind, scarred, and cloaked in destiny. As Xiala well knows, when a man is described as harmless, he usually ends up being a villain.
Crafted with unforgettable characters, Rebecca Roanhorse has created a “brilliant world that shows the full panoply of human grace and depravity” (Ken Liu, award-winning author of The Grace of Kings). This epic adventure explores the decadence of power amidst the weight of history and the struggle of individuals swimming against the confines of society and their broken pasts in this “absolutely tremendous” (S.A. Chakraborty, nationally bestselling author of The City of Brass) and most original series debut of the decade.
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Humanity survives, but not on its own terms, when Lilith wakes aboard an alien ship after nuclear war.
Dawn
Sci-Fi · First Contact · Genetic Engineering · People of Color · Speculative Fiction
Our take
Humanity survives, but not on its own terms, when Lilith wakes aboard an alien ship after nuclear war. In Dawn, Octavia E. Butler builds a post-apocalyptic story around coercion, survival, and the cost of starting over. It fits readers drawn to cerebral science fiction that uses first contact, genetic change, and social tension to probe power, identity, and what remains of the human future.
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What if a city came to life?
The City We Became
Magical Realism · Literary Fiction · People of Color · Speculative Fiction
Our take
What if a city came to life? In The City We Became, N. K. Jemisin reimagines New York as a living, breathing force split across six avatars. With 4.3 stars on Amazon and Hugo-winning brilliance, this genre-bending urban fantasy blends mythology, magic, and resistance into an unforgettable love letter to a city under siege by forces beyond our world.
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Every great city has a soul. New York has six.
When Manhattan wakes up in the body of a confused young man, he realizes the city is alive—and it’s under attack. Across the boroughs, five others awaken to find strange powers coursing through them, each one embodying a piece of New York’s spirit. They are the avatars of the city, and together, they must fight to save it from a cosmic force threatening to erase it from existence.
From Harlem graffiti that speaks to your bones to subway echoes that carry more than sound, New York has never felt so alive.
The City We Became is a dazzling, genre-defying urban fantasy by three-time Hugo Award winner N. K. Jemisin. This is the city’s story, told by the city itself.
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A wildfire reveals a secret world beneath the forest floor.
The Canopy Keepers
Fantasy · Literary Fiction · Magical Realism · People of Color
Our take
A wildfire reveals a secret world beneath the forest floor. Fire chief Syrah Carthan uncovers an ancient society divided between preservation and revenge, forcing her to choose between humanity and nature itself. The Canopy Keepers blends ecological fantasy with personal loss, earning 4.0 stars on Amazon and thousands of Goodreads ratings.
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What happens when nature will no longer stand by and accept its destruction? A female fire chief discovers an ancient world rooted with secrets that can save—or destroy—in the newest fantasy by Veronica G. Henry, author of Bacchanal.
Beneath the forest floor, they watch…
Syrah Carthan doesn’t know why she accepted a job as the first female fire chief at Sequoia National Park, where, decades earlier, a forest fire killed her parents. That day, her brother, Romelo, disappeared, as if pulled into the scorched earth itself. Syrah has always had an uncanny affinity for the natural wonders of the park she protects, but after she sanctions a prescribed burn that goes terribly wrong, she quits her position in disgrace.
However, when another devastating wildfire breaks out, Syrah, reluctantly pulled back into action, discovers an unknown world that has existed underground since the beginning of time. This secret society, built around the forest’s complex root system, is now divided into two factions. One is ruled by the Keeper, the giant sequoias’ benevolent caretaker. The other by a mysterious undoer, who’s determined to wage war on humanity. Through him, nature can retaliate and wipe out the earth’s careless ravagers for good.
Torn between human loyalty and preserving the delicate balance of nature, Syrah must make a choice—one that will change both her destiny and that of the world above and below forever.
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