TBB’s LIT LIST October 2025

Check out our recommended reads for the month of October …

This month’s picks are rich with memory, resistance, and reinvention. We’re diving into multi-generational stories of legacy and survival, unearthing hidden histories, and finding poetry in pain. From Zadie Smith’s essays to Barbara Fant’s soul-deep reflections, from concrete jungles to colonial legacies, each title brings a different kind of truth to the page.

Add these to your reading list, and make space for stories that stay with you this Black History Month!

Concrete Dreams by Ferdinand Dennis

No one could describe Lucas Bostock as a “nice” man. He’s a bully and a philanderer, so no one is surprised when his wife Rhoda has had enough and leaves him. Regretfully, she can take only her daughter with her, so he is forced to bring up their three boys in his rough and sometimes brutal way. Lucas has arrived in London from Jamaica in the 1950s with no illusions about being welcome here. He is sure that only hard work as a carpenter on building sites and scrimping to buy a house to become a landlord will give his family any security. Relentless ambition is what he tries to teach his sons – with his daughter he can make no contact – and Concrete Dreams follows the paths his children take – in boxing, journalism, politics, retail and religion – and their vexed relationship with their father. They are all forced to question just how much they owe him for the choices they make.

Publication date: 23rd October 2025
Publisher: Peepal Tree

Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith

Zadie Smith takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola, Kara Walker and Celia Paul. She invites us along to the movies, to see and to think about Tár, and to Glastonbury to witness the ascendance of Stormzy. She takes us on a walk down Kilburn High Road in her beloved North West London and invites us to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. She considers changes of government on both sides of the Atlantic – and the meaning of ‘the commons’ in all our lives.

Throughout this thrilling collection, Zadie Smith shows us once again her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.

Publication date: 30th October 2025
Imprint: Hamish Hamilton

Joy in the Belly of a Riot Poems, Prayers, Memories, and Meditations by Barbara Fant

At age fifteen, Barbara Fant tragically lost her mother, and her world was suddenly upended. “I became an angry teenager. I was mad at the world.,” she recalls. “I even stopped praying, but I began to write. Poetry became my way of communication, my way of processing . . . it became my way to pray.”

Rebirth, renewal, and healing are the heart of Joy in the Belly of a Riot. Fant’s monumental collection is a continuation of her lifelong project of using poetry as prayer; this is healing-informed poetry to restore herself, her community, and the world. Exquisitely lyrical and boldly resonant, Fant’s poems excavate the nightmares of a childhood marked by poverty, violence, racism, and the loss of countless loved ones. Suffering seemed endemic to neighborhoods like hers, and yet, in Fant’s own words, “I keep trying to write about the trauma, but the joy won’t let me.”

Steeped in a rich Black Christian tradition and drawing on Scripture for artistic inspiration, Fant’s verse offers solace and guidance for all, from the devout to the skeptical. In these poems Fant demands that we see her, and her community, throug more than our grief. As she closes this profound collection, Fant gently preaches that we choose life and reminds us that “wholeness is our birthright.”

Joy in the Belly of a Riot is a healing balm in times of sustained uncertainty and a rock upon which we can build and sustain a foundation of joy. Fant’s essential message demands to be heard, now more than ever.

Publication date: 2nd September 2025
Imprint: Amistad

The Mercy Step by Marcia Hutchinson

Bradford, December 1962.

A precocious Mercy makes her reluctant entrance into the world, torn from the warm embrace of her mother’s womb, to a chaotic household that seems to have no place for her. Her siblings do not understand her, her mother’s attention is given to the Church, and the entire family lives at the whims of her father’s quick temper.

Left to herself, Mercy finds solace in books, her imagination, and the quiet comfort of her faithful toy, Dolly. But escapism has its limits, and as the grip of family, faith and fear threatens to close in, Mercy learns she must act if she wants a different future; one where she is seen, heard, and her family set free.

Publication date: 22nd July 2025
Publisher: Cassava Republic Press

10 children Who Changed The World by Patterson Joseph

MEET THE TEN … Goddaughter to the Queen of England.Human rights activist. Librarian and author. Former slave. These ten inspiring children grew up in a time when slavery was still legal in most of the world and people who looked like them weren’t expected to become important.

But they did! The ten all went on to change the world through their acts of rebellion, bravery and adventure that helped secure their freedom and the freedom of so many from slavery. But how did these inspirational people change the world? To answer that, we’ll have to go back in time and met the ten aged ten, where their stories truly began . .

Meet Seaman William Brown, real name unknown, who’s love of adventure finds her sneaking aboard a British Royal Navy ship disguised as a man to explore the world beyond Grenada. · Get to know Ira Frederick Aldridge as he joins the Free African Americans School in New York and discovers his love of performing.

Celebrate Billy Sancho’s tenth birthday around the corner from Downing Street, London. Little does he know that he will become the first black librarian. · Return to Africa with Omoba Ina (know as Sara Forbes Bonetta), who has been sent to Sierra Leone by her godmother Queen Victoria, to become a missionary.

Discover the untold stories of these remarkable children as well as Phillis Wheatley, Ira Frederick Aldridge, Dido Elizabeth Belle, John Edmonstone, William Cuffay, and Mary Prince Daniels.

Publication date: 11th September 2025
Publisher: Wren & Rook

Human Resources: Slavery and the Making of Modern Britain – in 39 Institutions, People, Places and Things by Arisa Loomba and Renay Richardson

Ordinary items take on new meanings when you cast them in different light. The origins of tea, coffee and sugar are well known, but when you discover that gym treadmills were pioneered on plantations or that denim jeans were once clothing for enslaved people, you can’t help but ask where else the legacy of slavery hides in plain sight.

Through the stories of thirty-nine everyday places and objects, Renay Richardson and Arisa Loomba unpick the threads of the history that we never learned in school, revealing the truth of how Britain’s present is bound to a darker past.

Taking us from art galleries to football stands, banks to hospitals, from grand country houses to the backs of our kitchen cupboards, Human Resources is an eye-opening inquiry that gives a voice to the enslaved people who built modern Britain.

Publication date: 5th June 2025
Publisher: Profile Books

Picky by Jimi Famurewa

Food is never just food. It is freighted with our upbringings, our heritage and our sense of self.

Jimi Famurewa spends his days hunting out the very best food London has to offer and writing about it. But as a child, he hid gobbets of mash in his pocket at school, refused all vegetables and looked forward to Happy Meals in the back of a steamed-up car after late night football practice. He spent weekends in crowded flats at parties, watching his family preserve their Nigerian roots through jollof and fried plantain, as well as grow new shoots through American delights like Aunt Jemima’s pancake syrup, furtively hidden in suitcases.

But what happens when he grows up, stretching beyond the joyful chaos of his mother’s kitchen and into the uncharted territory, unfamiliar flavours and overlapping identities of the adult world?

With glorious dollops of nostalgia, Picky is as much a hymn to the gleam of the golden arches and the soft shine of worn formica as it is to opulent marble and tweezered micro herbs.

‘Exquisite, evocative writing’ Andi Oliver

‘Wonderful . . . A beautiful reminder that our appetites, like us, can transform beyond what we ever thought possible’ Ruby Tandoh

Publication date: 29th may 2025
Publisher: Hodders and Stoughton