At a time where the digital world offers little in the way of relaxation, it is important to harken back to activities we’ve enjoyed before Instagram screwed up the algorithm. There has been an influx of people (mainly millennials) putting the phone down and picking books up. If you’ve been looking to disconnect and get lost in another world, check the works from these fabulous authors below.

Photo: The Hollywood Reporter

Tomi Adeyemi is a Nigerian-American whose Young Adult fantasy novel, Children of Blood and Bone, is making waves across the country. The Harvard-graduate has much to celebrate as she reportedly made seven figures from the publishing and filming rights for her debut novel. Adeyemi hopes to inspire young black girls to be the lead in their own adventurous lives much like the main heroine in the book, Zelie Adebola.   

 

Yaa Gyasi 

Photo credit: Knopf Cody Pickens for TIME

Yaa Gyasi was inspired to write her breakthrough novel Homegoing on a trip to Ghana. Although she was born in Ghana, she hadn’t been back to her home country since her family moved to America when she was an infant. It was on this trip that the Stanford grad chose to write a book that follows the descendants of two half-sisters born in 18th century Ghana. One marries an English commander of the Cape Coast Castle while the other is captured and sold into slavery in America. The stories are beautifully woven together and you’ll find you’re unable to tear yourself away from the book.

 

Jesmyn Ward

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan; Scribner

The Sing, Unburied, Sing novelist is known for highlighting the cultural lifestyle of Americans dwelling along the Gulf Coast. Jesmyn Ward’s works seamlessly fuse the realities of Southern living with the inequities of blackness. Growing up in Louisiana and the impact of Hurricane Katrina are two factors that strongly influence Ward’s work and truly opens you up to another world.