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You say, generational saga about Black women. I say, give it here. I will tell you, though, that picking up African American historical fiction is a personal bracing exercise. We don’t have the option of looking back without confronting slavery, segregation, oppression, and all manner of racial atrocities. This layer of history is as personal and painful to visit in stories real and imagined as it is undeniable. And in one of my favorite new releases of 2026 so far, generational trauma born from the murder of an enslaved woman metastasizes into a curse that haunts the maternal bloodline of her descendants, following them from 19th century Land’s End, Alabama to 1990s Chicago, Illinois.
The Seven Daughters of Dupree by Nikesha Elise Williams
Tati wants to know the identity of her absent father but everyone around her, most of all her mother, Nadia, is tight-lipped. What Tati doesn’t know is that the story of her birth is tethered to the fraught history of the Dupree women, and one pivotal, violent event that dragged the first of many daughters beneath the shadow of a curse. Tati’s storyline, which breaks up stories of her family’s near and distant past, promises a crescendo or a reckoning. If anyone is going to wrench the Dupree skeletons out of the closet at last, it’s this sharp, persistent young woman.
Williams’ debut was as hard a read as you might imagine, exploring miscarriage, sexual assault, violence against women, and colorism. What I found interesting about this story that’s less obvious on its face, is the tension between privilege and oppression that appears so often in the lives of these women. The Duprees own land and many of them are light enough to pass for white, though only one makes a harrowing attempt. But because they’re Black and because of slavery’s profound and lasting impacts, they are never out of danger. They ward themselves against harm and heartbreak with little success.
The characters in this debut are richly imagined, and while their stories are laced with the speculative, the toll of generational trauma reads all too true.
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